Imagine What It's Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology [Paperback]

Ruth L. Nadelhaft (Editor), Victoria Bonebakker (Editor)

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From the Publisher

The intersection of wisdom and science is the territory of this anthology--ground that is contested, sometimes harrowing, and often ennobling.

The human experience of health care, whether ancient or modern, has always engaged those who practice it and those who encounter it as patients. Both those who live with illness of body and mind, and those who live and work alongside the patients, crave the opportunity to reflect on their experiences. In recent years, practitioners and patients alike have called attention to a crisis in our collective experience of medicine. There is a growing awareness of very different cultural expectations about the nature and treatment of illness.

The intersection of medicine and the humanities is busy. Machinery seems to crowd the space, while human encounters are often brief and deeply unsatisfying to patients and caregivers alike. Despite disparate approaches to the crisis in health care--from economics to ethics--there is agreement that patients and the world of medicine need more time together, so that illness does not find expression only in the context of the emergency room.

It is as a response to the collective sense of crisis and alienation that Imagine What It's Like has been constructed. Inside and outside the health care community, many have called for the chance to use the humanities not only as opportunities to reflect on their own experiences, but also as a means of improving the experiences of all of us whose lives will be touched by illness and healing, birth and death.

Created by the Maine Humanities Council for its Literature and Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care programs, Imagine What It's Like contains eighty-three selections ranging from poems to short stories to excerpts from longer works. The selections are divided into five sections--The Experience of Illness, Beginnings and Endings, Trauma and Recovery, Coming to Terms, and Healing Costs--and are followed by suggestions for longer readings.

Product Details

• Paperback: 659 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Hawaii Pr; 1 edition (July 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824833171
• ISBN-13: 978-0824833176
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The realms of feeling and reflection", February 15, 2009

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Linda Bulger (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Imagine What It's Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology (Paperback)

The health care business is complex and technology-heavy, too often losing sight of the patient in the battle against the disease. In 1997 the Maine Humanities Council introduced a program of cultural enrichment in Maine hospitals, designed to "foster wisdom in an age of information." The program, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), involved facilitator-led discussion of literature, and was intended to carve out time for reflection and to nurture a renewed understanding of the patient's wider human needs--as well as those of the care team.

The initiative grew out of the Maine Humanities Council's Seminars for Civil Leadership and was an embodiment of the brief to expand humanities programs into the workplace. Now an award-winning national program, LITERATURE & MEDICINE: HUMANITIES AT THE HEART OF HEALTH CARE has been taken up by eighteen other states and makes a broad contribution to health care delivery in a high-tech age.

Imagine What It's Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology was produced by the Maine Humanities Council with funding support from the NEH, companies and foundations, and the Hawaii Council for the Humanities. It was edited by Ruth Nadelhaft and contains eighty-three essays, short stories, excerpts and poems from what she calls "a necessary but still imagined intersection of medicine and the humanities." There are works from Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Conrad Aiken, Edward Albee, Flannery O'Connor, W.H. Auden--and many from lesser-known or even anonymous writers whose words evoke the human needs at the core of hospital experience. It's not a book to be read straight through: most of the selections require thoughtful consideration. I'm reading a copy from the medical library at my hospital and thanks go to the kind librarian who let me keep it long after its due date. It needs to go back to the library but I know where it's shelved. Sooner or later someone else will take it out, and then I'll buy my own copy.

My hospital has hosted a LITERATURE & MEDICINE group for several years, discussing books selected from the program reading list. It helps us to re-affirm the reasons we work in this field. I recommend the national Literature & Medicine program to anyone working in health care, and this fine anthology would be a rewarding read for anyone.

Linda Bulger, 2009