Sam Kean’s article in The Atlantic, “Why Doctors Should Read Fiction,” highlights what many medical schools, residencies and medical groups are realizing: medical providers and patients alike benefit from physicians taking an interest in literature. Kean asks, “if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine?”
Kean’s article outlines a study in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point.” The study found that “certain literary exercises…can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.”
Students rewrite and dissect short stories that expose an ethical case study, such as physician-writer Richard Seltzer’s “Fetishes.” The study’s author, Woods Nash, argues that “short stories are far more effective means of teaching students and health-care professionals to wrestle with the mess, to pay attention to narrative perspective and detail, and to become more comfortable with ambiguity.”
Writing Prompt: Have you read a piece of fiction that outlined a certain bioethical dilemma? Do you agree with Kean’s assertion that doctors should read fiction? How might the practice prove beneficial to a medical provider? Read Seltzer’s “Fetishes” and rewrite the story in short form, as a poem or case study. What new insight do you gain from this exercise? Write for 10 minutes.