Humanities in Medicine Writing: An Outlet and a Vessel Continued

of them loses anything from my infidelity” (3). Storytelling can be a way to acknowledge doubts about our abilities or shame over our mistakes that we couldn’t directly acknowledge to our colleagues or patients. Characters in literature are complete people, rather than the collection of diagnoses or snippets of history they can become in our notes and offices, and writing about our patients is a way to connect back to why so many of us went into a healthcare profession: to help people.

Many medical journals are recognizing the necessary role of the humanities in the practice of medicine and are adding sections for readers’ poetry and prose. I look forward to these pieces as windows into other types of illness and patients that I do not regularly treat, but also as mirrors to my own experience and feelings of wonder, gratitude, frustration, and inadequacy as a physician. Medical schools – as they increasingly envision and put into practice curricula that move beyond Abraham Flexner’s science-centered, four-year course – are more actively recruiting pre-medical students who majored outside of the basic sciences and are building narrative medicine experiences into their coursework. These tools are good training for honing observation and listening skills and help students view patients as whole people from the beginning of their training. Narrative medicine training also helps build the types of clinicians who “can stay with the emotional and personal complexities of illness without retreating into silent detachment or worse, simply avoiding the human aspects of healthcare altogether” (4). Additionally, time spent focusing on the humanities can also be a break from the rigors of medical education and give students skills they can turn to later in their career to process the physician experience.

You may not consider yourself “a writer,” but I encourage you to try to reflect on your practice or to write about something wholly outside of it to explore what it may do for your mental health, your enjoyment