Customer Reviews

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

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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