Why Novels and Poems in Our Medical Schools?

A Why Novels and Poems in Our Medical Schools? Robert Coles Why novels and poems in our medical schools? I am hardly in a position to be objective about that question. I went into medicine, I think it fair to say, out of an enormous respect for and admiration of Dr. William Carlos Williams, poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, critic, and, not least, physician. I wrote my college thesis on the first book of his long poem Paterson, and thereby got to know him. Until then, I'd been a "history and literature" major, with a strong side interest in jazz. I went on house visits with Dr. Williams, came to know some of his patients, became utterly taken with the work he did, decided (quite belatedly) to take premedical courses—and had a devil of a time doing so. I managed the subject matter fairly well, but I had a lot of trouble with the fierce, relentless, truculent competitiveness that seemed inseparable from the study of biology, organic chemistry, physics. And I regret to say that now, a quarter of a century later, I still see such an atmosphere at Harvard College—and no doubt other colleges have no immunity to the problem. Students come see me often, and their turmoil sends my head reeling with bad memories. How might we help intelligent, ambitious premedical students learn, yet resist the more unsavory aspects of premedical life? I do not think it an exaggeration to say that were it not for Dr. Williams's generous, personal support, I would not have lasted that first, college phase of scientific education, and maybe not the critical first two years of medical school—a continuation, then at least, of laboratory work, with virtually no chance to meet these ailing fellow human beings who get called patients. What Dr. Williams did, over and over, was to suggest books I ought to read: Chekhov, Camus, Kafka, not to mention some of his own stories (collected as Life along the Passaic). He urged me to read Arrowsmith again—a book usually read in high school or early college, then forgotten by many of us who become physicians. He reminded me, repeatedly, how much Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had to say about illness and its vicissitudes, and of course, Thomas Mann. As I responded, I found the Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 33-34 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 34 WHY NOVELS AND POEMS pleasures a reader obtains from a good writer; but I was also prompted toward ethical reflection by novelists, by poets who had a marvelous sense of life's continuing mystery, the ambiguities and ironies that never stop confronting us. It is a privilege, therefore, to be able to urge some of those same books on others—on medical students who, of course, require a mastery of biological factuality, but who also need (and, in my experience, almost hungrily crave) a chance to ask those haunting moral and philosophical questions a George Eliot, for instance, in Middlemarch, keeps posing: what is the meaning of the life we doctors so constantly try to protect, and how ought that life be lived—with what ideals and aspirations, with what accommodations, adjustments, compromises in the face of this world's constantly pressing opportunities, frustrations, and obstacles? ...