For the past week I have been in Tasmania, walking the Overland Track. (I wrote my previous two blogs before going.) While on this incredible six day walk you are out of contact with the outside world – no phone, except for a satellite phone to be used only in emergencies, no newspapers and, of course, no TV. On the last evening of our walk we came across a park ranger who gave us the news of the bushfires all around Victoria; the many lives lost, the homes destroyed, the thousands upon thousands of hectares of bush burnt. We counted back to the Saturday when it happened: we had been walking in soft and steady rain that day, walking over flowing creeks and under dripping trees. This in itself means nothing: this is just how things are. But oh for some rain like that in Victoria right now.

Answering Toni Jordan’s comment (11/2/09) about ‘science versus arts’ has got me thinking how medicine and the humanities intersect. Because they do, although it might not always be apparent. The Collins English Dictionary defines ‘the humanities’ as ‘the study of literature, philosophy and the arts.’ One of the definitions of the singular form of the word –that is, the word ‘humanity’ – is ‘the quality of being human’, while another is ‘kindness or mercy.’ I think a lot of doctors still tend to view the practice of medicine as a purely scientific exercise. They like to view their patient’s problem in an objective way, order the latest investigations then provide ‘treatment’, mostly in the form of pharmaceuticals. There’s a lot of talk in medical circles these days about ‘evidence-based medicine’. This is supposed to mean that a doctor looks at all the available research about treatment of a particular disease, then treats a person according to what the research says is the best option. But people aren’t just research subjects and what works in a study might not work for them. For one thing they might not be able to afford the latest whiz-bang medication or they might dislike the side-effects. This is where the humanities come in. People don’t experience an illness in a detached kind of way. The biological manifestations of a disease, especially those diseases that are serious and/or chronic – affect them emotionally and individually. While some doctors would like to filter all the emotional stuff, the truth is that you can’t, and in fact you can only do your best as a doctor when you recognise this.

So what’s all this got to do with writing or reading? I think one of the ways doctors and medical students can be put in touch with the emotional side of what they do is through the humanities, and most importantly, through writing. While some doctors and students will find great insight from writing about their experiences with patients, not all will be able or prepared to do so. But they can read – about suffering and fear and grief and courage and sacrifice and all those qualities that people exhibit when they are seriously ill. A lot of great books take illness and death as their central theme – from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to William Faulkner’s masterpiece, As I lay dying. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter is a wonderful novel about the death of a child. Joan Didion writes poignantly about the grief of losing her husband in My Year of Magical Thinking. Doctors and medical students could learn a lot from such books, and hundreds more like them, and in fact some medical schools in Australia are now starting to incorporate such reading into the medical curriculum.