Reading

Should doctors or medical students read more literature? No, I am not referring to medical literature published in the New England Journal of Medicine here, but literacy reading in the area of humanities.

This question comes to my mind partly because I am currently reading Ian McEwan’s novel about a neurosurgeon who knows literally nothing outside the lens of his dissecting microscope within the operating theatre. His tale helps shed light on the mess of a doctor's life immersed in a universe of Latin and Greek names (running through the big list of items, alas, like hippocampus, abducens nerve, amygdala, globus pallidus, blah, blah, blah) and many many corporeal facts.

Not long ago, I heard about a medical doctor taking a three-month sabbatical to sit on an island in the Mediterranean and do very little more than reading novels. Does art really make people better doctors? Or is it too big a claim? Good question. Indeed, there is nowadays growing enthusiasm in accepting the value of arts and humanities in medicine. The public might soon want an educated doctor – someone who masters the requisite clinical skills and superb knowledge in anatomy, but also the talent to read a patient as a real human being with thoughts and emotions. Go and quiz the medical students the antidotes for opioid or benzodiazepine overdose, and most of them might be able to give you the answers. As for the pain pathway, some nose-to-the-grindstone students might even lecture you on the mu receptor. So, why bother the extra reading? If there is something doctors can learn from novels in particular, then perhaps it is the compassionate judgment. At the very least, a doctor needs to care (or bother, whatever you call it) in order to sense that a human is in pain. This, I must agree, can be learnt a whole lot more from a novel than from the Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.