Poetry for the Uninitiated: Dannie Abse’s “X-Ray” in an Undergraduate Medicine and Literature Class [Book Review]
Journal of Medical Humanities 34 (4):429-432 (2013)
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
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Keywords | Pedagogy Medical or health humanities Undergraduate Poetry |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
DOI | 10.1007/s10912-013-9242-8 |
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Editors’ Introduction: Health Humanities: The Future of Pre-Health Education is Here.Sarah Berry, Therese Jones & Erin Lamb - 2017 - Journal of Medical Humanities 38 (4):353-360.
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