Some Reflections on Literature & Medicine : Eye Witness
by Martin Newhouse :::
bio
At the last session of the 2007 Literature & Medicine discussion group at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, we met to discuss Never Let Me Go, a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. As the program’s facilitator, I chose this work to end the series with what I hoped would be a thoughtful, informative, and ultimately moving discussion about the impact of science and technology on our society and on human nature itself. Based on my three years’ experience with the Literature & Medicine participants at Lahey, I knew that even if the discussion took off in unexpected directions, it would be an experience that I would treasure. I was not disappointed. As we grappled with Ishiguro’s challenging story, many of the themes that we had been discussing that spring resurfaced: themes dealing with normality, difference, communication, the need for love and for purpose, and the tragic choices our society is often driven to make.
Like many of the Literature & Medicine facilitators, I have college level teaching experience (in my case, as a teacher of cultural history). I also bring my perspective as a member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities’ Board of Directors. I became involved in the program because I was inspired by a presentation on Literature & Medicine at a Board meeting several years ago; I also benefited enormously from the Training Institute provided by the Maine Humanities Council, where I met many other scholar/ facilitators involved with the program in other states.
My experiences at Lahey have made me a passionate supporter of this program. From my perspective, Literature & Medicine yields tremendous results. First is the fact that Literature & Medicine delivers humanities content directly to people at their workplace. With respect to public humanities programs, people at their places of work are a truly underserved community since, sadly, the humanities rarely make an appearance there. One of the strengths of Literature & Medicine is that it offers the hard-working individuals at the Lahey Clinic, and the other hospitals where the program thrives, a rare and relatively convenient opportunity to read, reflect, and discuss issues with colleagues through the lens of literature, precisely because it occurs at their workplace. The participants meet over dinner after work hours, delaying their journey home by a mere couple of hours one evening a month for six months.
The opportunity for reading, reflection and discussion offered by the monthly Literature & Medicine meetings helps these busy professionals focus on issues that they may not ponder on their own, much less with colleagues. It does this by providing readings that cover various aspects of the practice and experience of medicine from the perspectives of both caregivers and patients, as well as addressing larger issues of the human experience. These readings come in various forms-novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, and histories-providing a kaleidoscope of perspectives that can offer new insights on familiar issues. For instance, in May 2007 we read three short stories by Chekhov (himself a doctor) and one short story by Hemingway that, collectively, raised questions concerning the limits of a doctor’s duty of loyalty to his patient and the limitations of medicine’s ability to improve the human condition. This February, we read Cockeyed by Ryan Knighton, a funny, unsentimental and eye-opening look at the author’s disability (blindness) from the intimacy of his inner point of view. Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind gave a similarly intimate and revelatory view of the author’s lifelong bipolar disorder.
Another real benefit of Literature & Medicine at Lahey and elsewhere is that it brings together individuals from different parts of the health care profession, and in that way improves communication and understanding. My sense is that Lahey is already a fairly well-integrated community. But during my training in Maine I came to realize that the hospital setting in general can be one of the most hierarchical around, and that it is perhaps only in the Literature & Medicine setting that nurses, doctors, social workers, secretaries, and others actually get to communicate across hierarchical lines outside of their normal roles. In our program, all sorts of people who typically might not cross paths and, in any case, might not have the opportunity to communicate in anything but a strictly professional sense (doctors, chaplains, nurses, and a hospital van driver, for example), are talking to each other about vital issues of medicine, healthcare policy, and even life’s most wrenching situations.
This leads me to what I consider to be the primary (and at the same time the most intangible) virtue of the program. Both the humanities content—the poetry, fiction, history, and analysis about medical issues, disease, communication, tragedy, and so forth—and the cross-departmental nature of the dialogue are bound, in my view, to improve the ability of the participants to deal with their everyday lives, and hence have a positive effect on the delivery of health services at Lahey and any other hospital where the program is conducted. Those services, of course, are delivered to individuals from all walks of life and all economic strata.
Whether or not making medical professionals better at what they do was the original goal of the program, I see it as a real achievement in the monthly sessions. Not only are the participants made more sensitive to issues they face in their work life when, for example, they read extraordinary poetry about AIDS sufferers, recent works on lack of communication in the medical field and how doctors make mistakes, or a memoir of a parent who has had a sick child or suffered a suicide in the family; they also learn a tremendous amount from and about each other and their respective fields. Thus, doctors listen to what social workers say about their experiences and vice versa; psychiatrists trade impressions with oncologists, lab technicians, and chaplains. Ophthalmologists share their own experiences with secretaries, other doctors, and, occasionally, a van driver. How can this not improve the quality of the medical and other care that these individuals provide to patients?
As I look back over my three years facilitating the Literature & Medicine program at Lahey, certain moments inevitably stand out. These are the times when a particular work under discussion set our group on fire and we knew that we could have gone on talking all night. I am thinking particularly of our discussions of Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face; William Gibson’s play, The Miracle Worker; Franz Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis;” Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “My Father’s Brain”; and Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, An Unquiet Mind. Each of these works touched a chord with our group, the intensity of which I had not predicted. Except that perhaps I should have known that works like these, each centered on the ultimately solitary experience of human intelligence confronting the world, would have hit a sympathetic chord with a group of people dedicated to serving human needs.
But my strongest feeling as I survey the work that we have done at Lahey is a sense of gratitude to the participants in the Literature & Medicine program who warmly welcomed me to their midst and opened up to me their thoughts and feelings about some of the most important issues affecting not only medical science but also the human heart. In doing so, they have immeasurably enriched my life, and I hope our discussions and the works we have read have also enriched theirs.
(This has been edited from the original.)©2007 The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities
Eye Witness is a column devoted to the stories of Literature & Medicine participants. We invite you to submit short essays about your experiences in the seminars, and to share your reflections with a larger audience.