Toward Negative Capability: Literature in the Medical Curriculum

Abstract

Literary inquiry has been a part of the curriculum at many North American medical schools for more than 30 years. Ostensibly its original purpose was to “humanize” the overstuffed, science-based curriculum. Since then, other rationales for its place in the curriculum have appeared, including, among others, translating critical reading skills to “reading” the patient, obtaining moral knowledge, and acquiring patients’ perspectives on illness. In this article, I use my experiences in a literature and medicine class for fourth-year medical students to examine how they construct “family”—the medium in which most medical care is delivered— through their readings of Pat Conroy’s novel, The Prince of Tides. Throughout the article I return to assumptions of how literature is supposed to “work” on medical students as they read this novel, showing how the culture of medical education, particularly its curriculum practices, has installed ways of reading and methods of analysis that oppose literature’s potential offerings. Beyond the selection of texts, I address issues surrounding the epistemological, pedagogical, and ideological undertaking of literary inquiry in the medical curriculum.