Abstract
I recently taught an upper-division Honors class in Medicine and Literature with students ranging from a pre-physician’s assistant student and nursing student to English, French, History, and Technical Writing majors. The common thread connecting these students initially was their self-described fear of and helplessness with poetry. However, as the semester drew to a close, their class discussion and journals revealed not only increased comfort with poetry but also a preference for it. The information and insight they got from poetry, they said, were the reason they took a medical humanities course in the first place and commented that the poetry we read provoked more substantial “medicine and literature” discussions than prose. Poetry provides a good starting place to analyze complex human relationships, and the focus on language and form levels the intellectual playing field: students are all unfamiliar with how to do it and are learning a new skill together. This could be accomplished, of course, with a literary short story, but for the diverse population of students in this class, the brevity of poetry made it all the more appealing.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abse, Dannie. 2001. “X-ray.” In On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays, edited by Richard Reynolds, M.D. and John Stone M.D., et al., 193. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Carver, Raymond. 2002. “A small, good thing.” In A Life in Medicine: A Literary Anthology, edited by Robert Coles, M.D. and Randy Testa, et al., 180–203. New York: The New Press.
Davis, Cortney and Judy Schaefer, eds. 2003. Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Edson, Margaret. 1999. Wit: A Play. New York: Faber & Faber.
Hemingway, Ernest. 2001. “Indian Camp.” In On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays, edited by Richard Reynolds, M.D. and John Stone M.D., et al., 102–05. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Moore, Lorrie. 1999. “People Like that are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Need Onk.” In Birds of America, 212–50. New York: Picador.
Young, Roxanne K., ed. 2005. A Piece of My Mind: A New Collection of Essays from JAMA. New Jersey: Wiley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shigley, S.B. Poetry for the Uninitiated: Dannie Abse’s “X-Ray” in an Undergraduate Medicine and Literature Class. J Med Humanit 34, 429–432 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9242-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9242-8