Creative writing may not be the first course that comes to mind when you think about a pre-med or medical school curriculum. But, writing—along with other arts and humanities courses—can play a vital role in preparing medical students for life as a physician.
Rita Charon, along with a multidisciplinary group of scholars, founded the discipline of narrative medicine in 2003, in response to the increasingly bureaucratic direction of medical care. Narrative medicine’s goal is to recenter physicians on the humanity of their patients by providing tools to allow physicians to contextualize patients outside of the hospital setting and uncover ways to connect by considering a patient’s pain, stories, life, and loved ones. Charon describes narrative medicine as a “...commitment to understanding patients’ lives, caring for the caregivers, and giving voice to the suffering.”
The benefits of incorporating narrative medicine, or the study of arts and humanities into the medical curriculum are clear. In 2010, Columbia Medical Students were required to take a half-semester arts and humanities course in narrative medicine, and these students were then interviewed in focus groups about the experience. The findings, published in the Journal of Academic Medicine in 2014, were summarized: “Students’ comments articulated the known features of narrative medicine—attention, representation, and affiliation—and endorsed all three as being valuable to professional identity development. They spoke of the salience of their work in narrative medicine to medicine and medical education and its dividends of critical thinking, reflection, and pleasure.”
In addition to promoting empathy and connection, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Vitez, Director of Narrative Medicine at Temple University’s School of Medicine, spoke to the value that writing can provide in helping students work through complex and painful experiences. He described a medical student who wrote a poem after a difficult day in her psychiatric rotation. “It helped her process her emotions and turn a really bad day into something valuable,” he said.
Narrative medicine can also bolster physicians who are struggling with symptoms of burnout. “No one was talking about clinician burnout at that time. But, as narrative medicine programs began to spread across the country, some physicians trained in its principles began to see how it can protect clinicians from feeling a sense of depersonalization and other symptoms of burnout,” Dr. Charon told Neurology Today. In the same article, Sneha Mantri, MD, MS, and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Duke University School of Medicine, described how her struggle caring for critically ill patients during residency led her to seek an MS in Narrative Medicine. In her view, the degree gave her the tools to return to medical practice and deal with the “burnout-inducing frustration of treating chronically ill patients with difficult-to-manage symptoms” and replace it with empathy for the patient’s perspective and the reminder “that knowing medical facts is just one part of caring for a patient.”
If you are a premedical or medical student with an interest in the arts and humanities, pursue it! It will likely play an invaluable role in preparing you to analyze, contextualize, and show up for patients with empathy and understanding. And as you prepare your applications for medical school, residency, or fellowship, be sure to highlight the skills that you have gained through previous humanities coursework and experiences, and the perspectives you have gained.
Examples of narrative medical texts here:
“How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead,” Naomi Rosenberg, MD, New York Times
“What We Talk About When We Talk About the Code,” Lilli Schussler, JAMA Cardiology
Related blogs:
Covid Crisis Brings Attention to the Need for Humanities in Medical School Curriculum