4^ Literature and Medicine Ronald A. Carson Literature's power lies in its ability to call up and articulate feeling. Medicine teaches mistrust of feeling. And who would dispute that skepticism toward the wash of feelings is well advised for medical people? But feeling, given form, can instruct medical sensibility. Literature can show how human experience can be molded without being manhandled. It was, I think, W. H. Auden who said, "A real book reads us." Literature can provide students precious insights into themselves, "precious " because introspection is alien to professional education and because knowing oneself—one's limits, one's strengths, one's feelings about misery and death—is essential to healing. Literature is not only reflexive. It can also teach care. Not, obviously , in any skill-related sense, but rather care learned from close and patient reading—from what John Passmore has called "an apprenticeship in being careful."1 And who is to say whether there may not be some salubrious spillover from caring about characters to caring for patients. Carefully reading James Dickey's "Cancer Match" instructs more than a score of pious treatises on hope. Katherine Anne Porter's "He" tells the perceptive reader volumes about the fierce pride of poor country folk. Chekhov's cameo of the griever in "Misery" impresses as no clinical description could. And so on. What are the tasks of teachers of literature in medical settings? They are very like the tasks of teaching literature to intelligent nonspecialist students anywhere. But there are a few distinctive challenges and dangers. Teachers of literature in medical settings function best as educated amateurs. They should love the material they choose, know it, and adeptly find ways to let the texts speak to the students—to move, to touch, to evoke and provoke. Such an eclectic approach to selecting materials sacrifices breadth, but that is legitimate. These are not consummate critics-to-be, but doctors-in-training. What one may not compromise is depth of perception, intellectual rigor, acuity of perception. Literary professionals in medical settings forget, at their peril, that Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 44^6 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Ronald A. Carson 45 they are not in graduate seminars. Temptations to overteach texts are ever present. But what may dazzle graduate students bores (or is simply lost on) professional students. I am not, emphatically not, implying that literature should be "watered down" for the uninitiated. Nor am I proposing that one simply lay some literary wares before busy professionals hoping they will work their magic. (I have read of an experiment in "literature and medicine" that amounted to sandwiching excerpts from novels into surgical rounds, apparently a kind of Whitman sampler.) Students need guidance; the texts must be taught. I am suggesting that most professionals-in-training are strangers to literature and that what they can carry away from an encounter with some well-chosen texts, well taught, is literature's power—the truth of human experience it captures and conveys. This is best accomplished without straining for relevance . Certainly material should never be milked for medical meaning. (One cannot, in any event, "make" a text something it is not already.) How does one perform the peculiarly passive act of permitting a text to speak for itself? Of many possibilities, one currently unconventional answer deserves attention. Roger Shattuck has written that "the critical activity of teaching literature should include as one of its essential goals the oral interpretation of literary texts."2 His recommendation, aimed at rescuing literature from literary professionals, is especially apposite for our purposes. Reading aloud forces "close attention to what a piece of writing is actually doing without requiring an elaborate theory of literature to begin with."3 It is thus especially well suited to the medical classroom. The student coming to a text with fresh eyes is at no disadvantage when the text is read aloud by the professor. What is more, if students have done their homework (and this requirement should not be shirked by teachers of literature pressured by the knowledge that the students are worked hard by colleagues in the sciences and the clinical fields), their several private interpretations...
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