Why Teach Literature and Medicine? Answers from Three Decades
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Why Teach Literature and Medicine? Answers from Three Decades Anne Hudson Jones
Published online: 1 September 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract In this essay, I look back at some of the earliest attempts by the first generation of literature-and-medicine scholars to answer the question: Why teach literature and medicine? Reviewing the development of the field in its early years, I examine statements by practitioners to see whether their answers have held up over time and to consider how the rationales they articulated have expanded or changed in the following years and why. Greater emphasis on literary criticism, narrative ethics, narrative theory, and reflective writing has influenced current work in the field in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1970s. The extraordinary growth of interest and work in the field nationally and, especially since 1996, internationally has included practitioners in many additional areas such as disability studies, film studies, therapeutic writing, and trauma studies. Along with the emergence of narrative medicine, this diverse community of scholars and practitioners—affiliated more through their use of narrative methodologies than the teaching of literature—makes the perennial challenge of evaluation and assessment even more complicated. Keywords Literature and medicine . Medical education . Medical ethics . Medical humanities . Moral inquiry . Narrative ethics . Narrative medicine This JMH special issue on medical humanities pedagogy goes to press 40 years after Joanne Trautmann joined the Department of Humanities of the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine at Hershey in 1972. Because she was the first professor of literature to hold a regular full-time faculty position in an American medical school, Trautmann’s appointment at Hershey has often been regarded as the beginning of literature and medicine as a recognized subspecialty within medical humanities. Although the Department of Humanities was an integral part of the new Penn State College of Medicine when the doors
A. H. Jones (*) Institute for the Medical Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Boulevard, Galveston, TX 77555-1311, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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J Med Humanit (2013) 34:415–428
first opened in 1967, not until 5 years later was literature added to the program. This pattern of development has been repeated many times in the years since. Historically, if not still contemporaneously, the “practical immediacy” (Trautmann 1982, 7) of history of medicine, medical ethics, and medical jurisprudence has been more readily apparent than that of literature and medicine. Misperceptions that literature offers more by way of cultural refinement than practical skills for clinicians—the infamous “civilizing veneer” charge (Charon 2000; 2004; 2012)—has made literature seem to some a luxury rather than an essential component of medical education. Early practitioners of literature and medicine were often called upon to explain and justify their ac
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