conversations about medicine and life
Dr Rae Varcoe was a Leukaemia and Lymphoma Physician at Auckland Hospital for 30 years. She has been a poetry reader for much longer and began writing verse at Victoria University’s inaugural MA class in 1997. Poetry has been one of the buttresses of her life in medicine.[Read more…] about “I give you my guessing tubes”: 4 poems by Rae Varcoe
Dr Joe Baker
All you need to know about General Practice can be learnt from reading Austen.”
So said Anne, my GP training supervisor. Needless to say when it came to the final exam I fared poorly with the medical emergencies, although I did better with those patients who had complex interpersonal relationship problems.
Dr Jacob Edmond
I coordinate a University of Otago English paper, ENGL131: Controversial Classics, which is an approved eighth paper for Health Science First Year. As I posted on the course Facebook page, ENGL131 fosters the skills that a recent report suggests are the best predictors of success in the health professions: critical thinking, analysis, and communication.
[Read more…] about Why studying Milton and Plath might make you a better doctor
Dr Ruth Cunningham
Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.”
― Hippocrates
When I was finishing high school in the early 1990s and considering what to do next, several teachers and friends of my parents suggested that studying medicine might allow me to balance my interests and aptitudes in both art and science subjects, as well as offering a multitude of rewarding career opportunities.
And so I enrolled at Otago, hoping to be accepted to medical school, but wanting to keep my options open and excited by the opportunity to try new disciplines such as philosophy. In my first year I was able to study medieval history, modernist literature, epistemology and logic alongside the compulsory papers required. Other potential doctors around me studied anthropology, psychology, mathematics, Māori, even law.
Dr Lesley Morrison
On the bookmark inside Tools of the Trade, a little pocket book of poems for new doctors, is a poem by the doctor poet Gael Turnbull, ‘Lines for a Bookmark’:
You who read..
May you seek
As you look;
May you keep
What you need;
May you care
What you choose;
And know here
In this book
Something strange,
Something sure,
That will change
You and be yours.
This was and is very much our aspiration for this project, to enhance the experience of being a new doctor, and to provide a comforting, supporting and illuminating friend.
Dr Joe Baker
We are told medical students flourish with a good dose of the humanities but as with all interventions the verification is in the dessert. Even the most gorgeous sounding of approaches should have its outcomes considered.
In recent years medical students have had lists of recommended readings thrust upon them. I wanted to know how these students had turned out as doctors and how literature might have influenced their practices.
My first study subject was Dr Laurence Gielgud who, as a second year student, was encouraged to read the works of Shakespeare. Gielgud set up the aptly named Globe Medical Centre in a leafy Dunedin suburb in the 1990s. We agreed to meet there one Tuesday. Unfortunately when I arrived he had just been called away.
[Read more…] about Medical Training and the Humanities: a study
