“It Doesn’t Look Good”: Teaching End of Life Care through Carver’s Poetry (chapter 3)
Johanna Shapiro and Audrey Shafer
The decades-old field of Medical Humanities, which integrates literature and medicine, has been periodically reinvigorated by such theoretical constructs as narrative ethics and narrative medicine.l However, in terms of curricular application, we still have much to learn about what happens when medical students sit down to read poetry or short stories. This essay does not provide a critical analysis of Raymond Carver’ s medically-related work, but describes and analyzes what transpires between students and Carver’s authorial voice in a medical education setting.