Literature and Medicine: How the Humanities Can and Should Contribute to Healthcare Training
This presentation highlights the pioneering cross-disciplinary work of Ronald Schleifer, Ph.D, Professor of English; and Jerry Vannatta, MD. Schleifer and Vannatta have been team-teaching and co-authoring work on the Health Humanities since 1999. The Presentation will be begin with a short introduction to their work: how Dr. Vannatta discovered how engagements with literature enhanced his engagements with patients in the clinic; and how Professor Schleifer discovered how the practical work of clinical medicine allowed him new ways of thinking about, teaching, and analyzing literature. After a short introductory presentation, a moderator will present the University of Oklahoma faculty team with questions and concerns about the health humanities. In 2013 they published The Chief Concern of Medicine: Integrating the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices (2013). (The book advocates the inclusion of the patient’s “chief concern” – their individual concern about their condition – to complement the “chief complaint,” which is the first item in the patient’s chart.) The well-known philosophy Martha Nussbaum noted of their co-authored book that “the authors have figured out how to use the deep but unsystematic illuminations of literature and moral philosophy to create a teachable and challenging discipline that can be taught to doctors, increasing dramatically the level of human understanding present in the doctor-patient encounter. All of us who have been, are, or will be patients—and of course that is all of us—are deeply in their debt.”
