When it comes to caring for patients, medicine relies more on the art of storytelling than science, says guest who will lecture April 1
To treat patients' conditions better, modern doctors need to expand their "who done it" approach to solving medical mysteries, says Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, who will speak at Brown April 1.
In the old detective metaphor, once the crime is solved, the job is over. These days, with chronic illnesses becoming a large part of medical practices, doctors need to broaden their case histories to include more about the lives from which their patients come and to which, well or ill, they must return.
"The diagnostic skills of Sherlock Holmes are not outdated," says Montgomery, a professor of medicine and of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. "Holmes need only make fuller use of Watson's awareness that the lives of those who consult them are far more richly detailed than their misfortune suggests."
Montgomery's April 1 talk, "Medicine and the Masque of Science," will be at 4 p.m. in room 001, Salomon Center. Her talk is sponsored by the Harriet W. Sheridan Literature and Medicine Lectureship, an annual program combining literature and medicine.
When it comes to caring for patients, medicine relies more on the art of storytelling than science, says Montgomery, author of the book, "Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge" (Princeton University Press, 1991). In all of literature, medicine most closely resembles detective stories, she says, which arose about the same time as early advances in human biology were helping the scientific physician to identify disease and accurately describe its workings in the body. As Sherlock Holmes retells the victim's story and broods on physical evidence to reconstruct and solve the crime, a doctor reinterprets a patient's story and scrutinizes test results to arrive at a diagnosis and treatment.
The storytelling, or narrative, tradition is how medical professors train scientifically savvy students to be clinically competent doctors, Montgomery says. In the midst of the uncertainty of each new case, medical narratives provide the structure for physicians to learn and teach, to record familiar maladies, and to investigate and report unfamiliar ones. A better understanding and use of narratives will help improve medical discourse for both doctor and patient, she says.
The Sheridan Lectureship was established after the Brown literature professor's death from cancer to provide a special forum to preserve and continue her interest in the interdisciplinary exploration of doctors, doctoring, illness, and healing in literature.