Book Review: Medicine and Humanistic Understanding: The Significance of Literature in Medical Practices

Johanna Shapiro, PhD

Literature and medicine have been inextricably intertwined since the time of the Greeks. Often, as in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein, literature has been concerned with the idea that science and technology threaten medicine’s humanistic heart. In the case of the DVD Medicine and Humanistic Understanding: The Significance of Literature in Medical Practice, we find technology in the service of literature and medical humanism, and it is a remarkably successful experiment, which enhances, enlivens, and inspirits the once-predictable academic text.

Read the full article