poems and narrative medicine

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES: The field of medical education in our country remains deeply fragmented and polarised between the biomedical technical domains which are overrepresented and the humanitarian domains which are under-represented within the universe of medical pedagogy. To overcome this imbalance, we designed a module that integrates the two domains in a holistic biomedical and socio-cultural framework with the objective of providing unified field of learning experience to the undergraduate medical students attending rotatory clinical postings in a medical college in New Delhi, India...

This paper explores the contexts and relationships in which EMR/EHR technology is used in healthcare settings. It approaches the EMR/EHR as an issue in clinical ethics. The author recognizes the immense contribution that healthcare informatics makes to coordinating and integrating medical care at the level of individual physician, nurse, and institutions. At the same time the author raises a cautionary note about some unrecognized dimensions of the use and experience of the EMR/EHR. The author argues that the EMR/EHR can consciously and unconsciously become an instrument of assembly line-like physician "productivity" and "production reports" that depersonalize patient and physician alike...

OBJECTIVE: To find out if Shakespeare, famed for his insights into human nature, is exceptional in how much his characters express grief through somatic symptoms and signs, and by physical illness. METHODS: The texts of all large-scale works currently attributed to Shakespeare (39 plays, 3 long narrative poems) were systematically searched for bodily changes and for evidence of grief as dominating the character's emotional state at the time. The findings were compared with those from a search of 46 works, similar in genre, by 15 prominent playwrights active at the same time as Shakespeare...

This review considers novels, plays and poems dealing with movement disorders in order to show the relevance in the literary context. The motifs are arranged and compared following a modern neurological nosology according to Parkinson syndromes, dystonia, myoclonus, tics, hemifacial spasm, Tourette syndrome, Huntington's disease and hyperekplexia. There is considerable variety in how movement disorders are depicted and how much influence they have on the plot structures. Their usage ranges from a brief reference in order to accentuate aspects of a character's personality or social position, such as in Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy or Galdós; to truly constituting one of the plot's main themes as, for example, with the representation of Lewy body disease in Franzen's The Corrections and Huntington's disease in Vonnegut's Galápagos, Sawyer's Frameshift or McEwan's Saturday...

This research was designed to test the hypothesis that Milton's poem Paradise Lost is meaningfully patterned with respect to sound. Thirty-six segments from 12 Books of Paradise Lost were scored (Whissell, 2000) in terms of their proportional use of Pleasant, Cheerful, Active, Nasty, Unpleasant, Sad, Passive, and Soft sounds. Paradise Lost includes more Active, Nasty, and Unpleasant sounds and fewer Pleasant, Passive, Soft, and Sad sounds than a representative sample of anthologized poetry. The way in which emotional sounds are patterned (e...

Robert Burns's poem, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 1785, tells of the drunken narrator's late night encounter with Death. The Grim Reaper is annoyed that ‘Dr Hornbook’, a local schoolteacher who has taken to selling medications and giving medical advice, is successfully thwarting his efforts to gather victims. The poet fears that the local gravedigger will be unemployed but Death reassures him that this will not be the case since Hornbook kills more than he cures. Previous commentators have regarded the poem as a simple satire on amateur doctoring...

OBJECTIVES: To determine how often Shakespeare's characters faint, fit, or die from extreme emotion; to assess Shakespeare's uniqueness in this regard; and to examine the plausibility of these dramatised events. DESIGN: Line by line search through modern editions of these late 16th and early 17th century works for accounts of characters fainting, fitting, or dying while under strong emotion and for no other apparent reason. DATA SOURCES: All 39 canonical plays by Shakespeare and his three long narrative poems; 18 similar works by seven of Shakespeare's best known contemporaries...

Rural family medicine residencies and practices continue to have difficulty attracting applicants and practitioners. Students facing decisions about rural training or practice may be deterred by negative stereotypes or a lack of understanding about rural experience. Renewed efforts to foster students' interest and influence students' intent toward rural practice are sorely needed. The authors report one such innovative strategy that used literary sources, many written by rural physicians, to trigger discussion and reflection among a group of 11 medical students who volunteered in 2004 to participate in a two-day retreat sponsored by The Ohio State University College of Medicine Rural Health Scholars program...

Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the 20th century's greatest playwrights, wrote his masterpiece, Yerma, shortly after feeling betrayed and abandoned by his closest friend Salvador Dali. At the same time, he also wrote a poem entitled "When I was Ten" that captured the pain and loneliness he experienced when his family moved from the country, where he was happy and surrounded by loving and admiring friends and family, to the city, where he was lonely and ridiculed in school for his effeminate manner. This temporal association suggests that Lorca was struggling with the same painful affects in adulthood as he had as a child and that he was employing the same coping mechanism he had developed early in his life, that of creating a fantasy that served as a secondary self-object to repair self-fragmentation caused by a rupture in a crucial primary self-object relationship...

Both professionalism and interpersonal communication are core competencies for emergency medicine residents as well as residents from other specialties. The authors describe a weekly, small-group seminar lasting one year for emergency medicine residents that incorporates didactic materials, case studies, narrative expression (stories and poems), and small-group discussion. Examples of cases and narrative expressions are provided and a rationale for utilizing the format is explained. A theoretical model for evaluation measures is also included...