(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin says that reading literature can help health care workers learn how to provide better care.
(LUSKIN) Medicine may be a science, but healing is an art. When we go to the doctor, first we take off our clothes, and then we tell the story of our illness. A doctor pokes and probes, but a healer listens. Healing depends on naked narrative.
These days, we patients have to tell our stories many times: to the receptionist who answers the phone, to the nurse who records our vital statistics, to the nurse practitioner who examines us, to the physician who is called in to consult.
No wonder it’s easy for the thread of a patient’s narrative to break, and difficult for caregivers to tie the pieces together. Until recently, little attention was paid to educating health care workers in the narrative arts. Narrative Medicine – a field that uses literature to improve medical practice – is becoming a regular part of on-going medical education.
Vermont is one of nineteen states currently offering health care workers a course in Literature and Medicine, called Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare.
Since 2004, employees at thirteen of our fifteen hospitals have had the opportunity to learn narrative skills salient to the practice of medicine by reading, thinking and coming together to discuss literature.
Many of the participants haven’t read imaginative literature since their last required English class; others read fiction, but not poetry, and usually as a way to escape from the pressures of work, not as a means of evaluating what it is they do. All read a great many jargon-laden quantified studies written from a standardized point of view. Few have had a chance in their recent work lives to sit back and reflect about how storytelling and language are central to their professional lives.
In a group I led at the Rutland Regional Medical Center, we recently discussed Kyrie, a sonnet cycle about the 1918 influenza pandemic in Vermont written by Ellen Bryant Voigt, a Vermont poet.
In poems of only twelve lines, Voigt conjures the essential struggles the population of a small village faces when the Spanish Flu arrives. There’s the doctor, who carries his black leather bag “like a Bible” even though it’s empty. There’s the schoolteacher, afraid to comfort her pupils for fear of catching disease.
Participants were able to examine closely the composition of each poem, as if the poem itself were a patient whose complaint is both text and subtext. The group discovered strategies for decoding what each poem says, or sometimes even more important, determining what is left unsaid. Participants saw how poems are like patients, and how we each bring a unique perspective to our own suffering and survival.
There’s no question that medical science has brought us cures unimaginable a hundred years ago. But there’s also no question that healing begins with being heard.
Deborah Luskin teaches writing and literature to non-traditional students in hospitals, libraries and prisons throughout Vermont.