Janice G. Doty Lecturer in Medical Humanities Rice University houston, Texas
Abstract: Advocates for the humanities in healthcare education often emphasize the professional skills engendered by literary study. Specifically, proponents of narrative medicine argue that reading literature teaches healthcare workers to be more empathetic and ethical listeners. This position has received widespread criticism: Narrative medicine and the broader health humanities have been accused of failing to address the structural inequities shaping healthcare and of diluting the critical force of humanities scholarship in the service of biomedical goals. Rarely challenged, however, are the assumptions within narrative medicine discourse that 1) the skills of literary analysis are translatable to interpersonal interactions, and 2) that the value of studying literature in healthcare contexts lies in its facilitation of measurable empathetic and narrative competencies, rather than in the content of literary texts themselves. This paper argues that literature should be valued not only for the interpersonal clinical skills it may encourage but for the knowledge that it offers about healthcare. I model this approach through a close reading of the work of British Caribbean modernist author Jean Rhys. I employ feminist and historicist methods of literary analysis to show how Rhys’s fictional depiction of early-twentieth-century childbirth eschews emotional identification on the part of the reader and instead exposes how ideologies of class and race shape her protagonists' access to maternal care. I close by encouraging other health humanities scholars to foreground the epistemological rather than emotional value of analyzing fiction about health and medicine, whether such “value” can be measured within current biomedical metrics or not.
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