Book clubs for doctors help to humanize medicine

COLUMBIA, Mo. | Doctors, nurses and other health care workers are tapping into their inner Tolstoys to better connect with patients.

With increasing regularity, they’re meeting in monthly book clubs to discuss medical-themed literature. Humanities courses are now required in many medical schools.

“The humanities can remind them that they’re dealing with very complicated, whole individuals with their own needs and opinions,” said Elizabeth Sinclair, coordinator of the Maine Humanities Council’s literature and medicine program.

A hospital in Bangor, Maine, hosted the first program in 1997. The idea has spread over the years to 25 states, including California, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Virginia.

“If you want to understand what someone who is dying is going through, the highs and lows, the emotions, read Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Illyich,’” said Dr. Robert Blake. “One hundred years before Kubler-Ross identified the stages of dying, Tolstoy had it.”

Dr. Blake’s lifelong love of literature led him to retire early from the University of Missouri medical school to write short stories and teach an undergraduate honors class on medicine and literature.

He read recently from his work at the first meeting of the new medical book club at the university’s teaching hospital. The audience of doctors, nurses, medical librarians and administrators listened raptly to a story of a young boy’s suspicious death and another about an old man begging to die.

Dr. Blake, 64, peppers his conversation with knowing nods to the great writers whose work informs his own: Tolstoy, Albert Camus, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Carlos Williams, among others.

The North Carolina native moved to Missouri nearly 40 years ago to attend medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. His own training meant medical charts and academic journals, not character development and plot exposition.

“In medical school, there was nothing of this,” Dr. Blake said. “And I think that was a big omission.”

A 2005 study by the Maine council showed that participants reported greater empathy for patients and colleagues, higher cultural awareness, increased job satisfaction and improved interpersonal skills.

“The program reminds them why they got into the profession in the first place,” Miss Sinclair said.

Trained to deal in certainties, some doctors can struggle with the murkier rules of literature, she added.

Dr. Abraham Verghese, a novelist and Stanford University professor, has devoted much of his career to exploring the connections between literature and medicine. A decade ago, he founded the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

Dr. Verghese agreed that patient empathy is at the heart of the humanities in medicine movement. He also advocated for a more physician-centric outlook.

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