Literature and Medicine

Literature and Medicine: A Practical and Pedagogical Guide is designed to introduce narrative medicine in medical humanities courses aimed at pre-medicine undergraduates and medical and healthcare students. With excerpts from short stories, novels, memoirs, and poems, the book guides students on the basic methods and concepts of the study of narrative. The book helps healthcare professionals to build a set of skills and knowledge central to the practice of medicine including an understanding of professionalism, building the patient-physician relationship, ethics of medical practice, the logic of diagnosis, recognizing mistakes in medical practice, and diversity of experience. In addition to analyzing and considering the literary texts, each chapter includes a vignette taken from clinical situations to help define and illustrate the chapter’s theme. Literature and Medicine illustrates the ways that engagement with the humanities in general, and literature in particular, can create better and more fulfilled physicians and caretakers. 

Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in Medicine, University of Oklahoma, USA. He served as editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Theory and of Configurations. He has written or edited more than 20 books. His most recent books are Pain and Suffering (2014) and A Political Economy of Modernism (2018). He is the co-author of two text anthologies Contemporary Literature Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies and A Postmodern Bible Reader (2001).

Jerry Vannatta is David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine and of Humanities in Medicine (MD, retired), and Adjunct Professor in the Honors College, University of Oklahoma, USA. He is currently Medical Director, Physician Assistant Program and Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities, Oklahoma City University, USA. He served as Vice President of the University of Oklahoma for Health Affairs and Executive Dean of the College of Medicine.