Narrative

Doctors - or medical students, for that matter - wouldn't come close to Barack Obama in terms of reading materials. 

Except novels. 

"It was important to pick up the occasional novel during the presidency," Obama told the interviewer a few days before leaving office in 2017. Reading memos and proposals every day, according to the first African-American president of the United States, makes a lopsided analytical brain that has lost track of the depth of fiction. Fiction should therefore be a way of seeing and hearing the voices, a useful reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.

Substitute Obama's memos and proposals with doctors' x-ray reports and lab values, and you will see how medical professionals can be led astray in the analytical brain. 

This is the good reason for doctors to follow Obama's example, and pick up reading materials other than those from medical journals.  

Remarkably little on fiction reading is mentioned in medical curriculum. So little, in fact, that Dr. Suzanne Koven at Massachusetts General Hospital has come up with a program on narrative medicine. I learned about her session of Literature and Medicine after recent reading of her memoir Letter to a Young Female Physician. Each month, Dr. Koven brought humanities into workplace when the doctors and nurses met to discuss novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems. 

Understanding the story obscured beneath a series of facts, as Dr. Suzanne Koven taught us, not only make us see a patient, but also ourselves, in a more compassionate and incisive way.