The fictional world: What literature says to health professionals

Summary

Our purpose has been to illuminate questions surrounding the use of literature in medical education, and to propose criteria for selecting literature which is more likely to evoke readers to reflect on their personal and professional selves. We have suggested that literature promoting vicariousness and vulnerability may validate readers' questions, insecurities, and beliefs insofar as readers are willing to engage with the text cognitively and phenomenologically. This we call reader responsibility. Crucial to nurturing this responsibility are medical educators 2- ducators in any context, for that matter – who are vulnerable themselves, who puzzle outloud, who admit their own incompleteness. Together as learners, teachers and students may come to realize that it is, in the end, the artist who

presses upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power ... (which) seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered. (Dillard 1989 72–73)