Roles for literature in medical education

Abstract

The sustained study of literary texts and, to a lesser extent, of techniques of literary analysis offers a number of educational ‘goods' to the medical curriculum, to medical students and to the clinical practitioners they will one day become. In addition to the intrinsic goods of literature – the intense and direct experience of connecting with another's vision of the world – there are ‘instrumental’ goods augmenting the clinician's necessary physical understanding of patients' bodies with the equally necessary personal understanding of patients as individuals. These goods include (within the context of a medical curriculum genuinely located in higher education rather than in mere training) skills of communication, sensitive appreciation of the ethical dimensions of practice, the development of students' personal values and the stimulation of an enduring sense of wonder at embodied human nature.