My Medical Humanities Journey
In the post introducing the blog (WORMHOLE), I mention that I’ve thought of the sciences and arts as two separate entities, with me having one foot in the sciences and the other in the arts and hopping in an “all or nothing” way between those two. I think the best illustration for this dichotomy happened when I was figuring out what to do for majoring in college. My piano playing skills made me eligible to apply and audition to the University of the Philippines College of Music, but I knew I wasn’t good enough to perform for audiences for a living. Which means the alternative music career would probably have been to be a piano teacher. I have nothing against piano teachers – I’ve had stellar ones – but I just couldn’t see myself doing that for the rest of my life. I didn’t (and still don’t) have the patience to teach children. So my focus shifted to the sciences – something along the lines of biology or physics, possibly medicine. Maybe.
On my application form to the University of the Philippines I wrote in “Molecular Biology and Biotechnology” (MBB) as my first choice and “Applied Physics” as the second, plus I decided to check that little box indicating my interest in the University of the Philippines’ Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine (INTARMED) program. If a career in medicine was meant to be, getting into the academically selective shortcut with two instead of four years of pre-med studies was the way to go. If I didn’t make the cut, then doctoring wasn’t going to be my life’s work. Well thank goodness I got into INTARMED. The college-level biology and physics in the INTARMED program were difficult enough; if I had taken more advanced science subjects as part of a four-year dedicated college course, I think I would have floundered enough to shift majors – probably to psychology.
On to our main topic. I had to introduce INTARMED because we had three Humanities classes during the two pre-medicine years. Humanities I (Literature, Man and Society) and II (Arts, Man and Society) were the core subjects mandated for all college students, but we had an extra one called Humanities 103: Image of Man in the Arts. I don’t remember what I learned from the class, but I do remember that we had artsy presentations of some sort – like a talent show. One of the requirements for Humanities class was an analysis of any form of art (for example, a pair of my classmates did their report on album covers). Elaine and I wrote ours on the medical thrillers of Robin Cook, an ophthalmologist and author. Aside from Cook, I also read similar thrillers by Michael Palmer and Michael Crichton. They were part of the genre that emerged in the 1970s (1) and became more popular in the 1990s onwards – right at the time when I was in pre-medical studies.
Eventually my attention shifted from medical thrillers to nonfiction, perhaps because I read at night before bed. I couldn’t put medical thrillers down, leading to compromised sleep. In general, I do prefer nonfiction so I was (and still am) often on the lookout for collections of essays or articles by physicians. Lewis Thomas, Danielle Ofri, Atul Gawande, Sherwin Nuland, Richard Selzer – just to name a few. While I was aware that these were books written by physicians, I wasn’t aware that they were part of a bigger body of work and field of study called the Medical Humanities.
I learned about the Medical Humanities during my Spinal Cord Injury research fellowship in Pittsburgh. I took an elective in Bioethics as part of the requirements for a graduate certificate in clinical research, because I didn’t want to do any more statistics and the like. In that course we analyzed Margaret Edson’s W;t (Wit), a one-act play about an English language professor dying of cancer. We presented our essays about the play at a local conference for the Medical Humanities. As I listened to the other presenters, I felt like I found my people. These were scholars who wrote about medicine and healthcare not as clinical trials and hard science, but rather in a literary, thoughtful and “soft” way. That conference was my formal introduction and I realized it was just the tip of the iceberg.
While medicine and art intersected in one week of that one semester, the rest of my career reflected the continuing dichotomy between art and science. Sure, I still read prose and poetry about medicine and vaguely knew about Penn State University’s pioneering work in the medical humanities. But those were things I did for pleasure and relaxation. When Columbia University offered a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine degree, I briefly toyed with applying but eventually decided against it – what would that add to my career? I wasn’t sure. And besides, I was too busy in clinical practice to study that.
The course on Representing Medicine: Performance, Drama and Identity was one of the reasons I was attracted to the Australian National University’s Master of Culture, Health and Medicine program. Finally, a way to get some formal training in the Medical Humanities and have someone guide my learning, instead of me just getting bits and pieces of knowledge from everywhere. Dr. Christine Phillips and her guest lecturers walked us through art, literature, graphic novels, television shows and even video games. We had many interesting and enlightening discussions, and often sharing our various perspectives about the topic and items discussed made for many nerdgasms on my part (my classmates were a nurse, a linguist, and an artist of some sort). That class was the highlight of my week last semester.
I’m sure my Medical Humanities journey does not end there. I am constantly looking for literature, art and other media related to physicians, patients, their relationships and healthcare in general. More lightbulbs will go on and more nerdgasms will happen – I am looking forward to both!
Notes:
(1) Cook, M., 2015. Bioedge: Keystroke: The World Of The Medical Thriller. [online] BioEdge. Available at: <https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/keystroke-the-world-of-the-medical-thriller/11416> [Accessed 7 December 2020].
