It helps you to be more attentive to the life story, which is the patient's experience of illness. At the same time that the importance of communication skills is being emphasized in medical education circles, the use of literature to develop future physicians' empathy for patients is becoming an increasingly common component in many schools' curricula. By reading and discussing poetry, short stories or novels, medical students can gain insight into the human experience that might otherwise take them a lifetime to attain. There is a huge contrast between the texts that are required reading for the narrative ethics class Martha Montello, PhD, teaches at both Harvard Medical School and the University of Kansas School of Medicine and the texts students are required to read for their other classes. Though most of the stories she uses are about illness, Dr. Montello tries to keep students from immediately drawing clinical parallels.
Many medical students welcome the opportunity to have a more reflective learning experience.
In it, a physician on a house call, convinced that a young girl has diphtheria, forcefully examines her throat. Baker was struck by the author's use of intense language and exaggeration to represent the emotions that can be triggered when informed consent is violated. By reading it, I'm not going to. In many ways, illness can be viewed as an alteration in a person's life story. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka paints a vivid picture of this kind of transformation.