What can literature do for medicine?

This is not a new question, but over the past three decades it has been asked with renewed urgency by medical professionals in Britain and America, who have turned to scholars in the humanities for aid in addressing perceived problems in biomedicine. The result of their joint effort, the field of health humanities, conventionally defines itself against biomedical reductionism, promoting ‘“a patient-centered approach to medical care”; “countering professional burnout”; and “equipping doctors to meet moral challenges not ‘covered’ by biomedicine”’. Literature is a star player in this expanding field, present everywhere from university-run bibliotherapy programs to the growing number of physicians trained in the practices of narrative medicine. Proponents of literary approaches speak of their powers with compelling faith. ‘Narrative medicine can help answer many of the urgent charges against medical practice and training—its impersonality, its fragmentation, its coldness, its self-interestedness, its lack of social conscience’, writes Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine (2006) and proponent of this practice, which teaches doctors to ‘close-read’ patients’ stories in order to promote empathetic communication. She continues:

Charon's elevation of ‘wholeness’ as the cure for biomedicine's ills is typical in celebrations of the health humanities. It is the most common shorthand for the difference between humanistic and medical approaches to personhood— among not only health humanists but also doctors, journalists, and literature and medicine scholars. More particularly, ‘wholeness’ is a frequently cited justification for the many health humanities initiatives centered on literature. Writing in the Lancet, for example, Anne Hudson Jones and M. Faith McLellan applaud the growing number of literature courses offered by medical schools: ‘Among the goals of these experiments, whether they involve reading fiction or writing it, are to deepen students’ capacities for empathy and to remind them of the totality of the lives of patients they may meet only in limited, fragmented ways’.