Books for doctorlings

[liv]

So the medical school is having a drive to encourage students to engage more with arts and humanities, so we don't end up with a lot of future doctors who haven't read a novel since they finished GCSE English. And they're asking for suggestions for books worth recommending to the students.

This seems like an interesting question, so I'm throwing it open to you: if you could recommend one book you'd like your doctor to have read, what would it be? They specify that it doesn't have to be about a directly medical topic, but just something that could help very science-specialized people to understand more about being human. Non-fiction is ok but they want literary non-fiction, things like biographies, rather than textbooks.

My thinking about this is that there's no point recommending the obvious nineteenth century Dead White Men classics, because even if the students were funnelled out of anything to do with literature in their mid teens they're all high achievers, they've almost certainly all "done" Dickens for GCSE and got As for their essays. And even the ones who don't read have read The man who mistook his wife for a hat because various how to get into medical school guides push it as something to mention at interview.

So, suggestions?

Comments

[vatine]

There's a few of interesting SF "military hospital in space" books. But now that I'm trying to recall titles, they all escape me. :(

I don't think this is the series and I must confess to not really having read them for, what, 20 years. But, that may not be a bad starting point.

[kaberett]

Dia Reeves Slice of Cherry, tbh, or maybe even Scalzi's Lock In. Both feature protags with chronic illnesses as your PoV character and are handled well; both encourage the reader to think about race and language and how brains work and to treat people with illnesses as human. And yeah they're maybe YA, but... whatever? And Lock In features a protag who is never gendered, of course.

[seekingferret]

Fred Pohl's Man Plus strikes me as an interesting possibility. It's about a man surgically modified to live on Mars, and it focuses a good deal on the medical aspects- the experience of undergoing the actual procedures, the subsequent adjustments to his new body, the feelings of isolation and distinction from other people.

This list, which was recced at Loncon, might also be a good place to look for ideas: http://www.lablit.com/the_list

[yvi]

"They specify that it doesn't have to be about a directly medical topic, but just something that could help very science-specialized people to understand more about being human."

Wow. That, um, really doesn't sound all that nice at all. Is that how they phrase it?

[liv]

Let me dig up the exact wording, here we go: they're seeking books that may encourage our medical students to read, explore the human condition, enrich their professional and personal lives. I possibly shouldn't have paraphrased explore the human condition as understand more about being human, but to me they mean much the same thing.

[silveradept]

I might recommend the Newsflesh trilogy, by Mira Grant - there's lots of did the research involved, but they can also get an idea of what a society in quarantine does, as well as how people behave knowing they have an infectious disease that could kill them at any point.

[oursin]

You might try the Wellcome Trust Book Prize winners/short lists? (Few of which I have read myself.) Because I don't suppose it's worth saying MIDDLEMARCH!?

[yvi]

Okay, so having thought about this some more, maybe I am taking this line and the "so we don't end up with a lot of future doctors who haven't read a novel since they finished GCSE English" some more, I guess I may be overreacting. It still plays into an overall trend which I am extremely uncomfortable with, namely that us "science-minded people" are always bad at being social and need to be educated about the Humanities to be well-rounded, with very little pressure given in the other direction.

For what's it worth, I know lots of doctors and scientists and they have all read books since finishing high school.

[yvi]

Hmm, I think my reaction might have been different with the added "enrich their professional and personal lives". Because that makes it clear that it's also supposed to be for the benefit of the students. Still don't like the overall vibe, but that's a sensitive issue for me and I realize that.

[seekingferret]

And for what it's worth, speaking as an engineer who reads, I know lots of engineers and scientists and doctors who don't.

I went to an engineering school that accidentally had a great English department, and it was criminally under-used by students trying to get as deep an engineering education as possible in the limited time we had. I don't feel like it's an attack on my classmates to say that they chose to focus on their major at the expense of a liberal arts education.

[hilarita]

Pratchett's Small Gods, or one of the Tiffany Aching series, if you want people learning how to be people really hard. Also, Tiffany Aching books come with a really strong line in 'and do not patronise people', which I can't help but feel is good for proto-medics.

[yvi]

Sure there are some (I only know engineers like that, though, not doctors/scientists) . Is that in itself something that needs to be fixed? People with a liberal arts education also usually do that at the expense of a scientific and mathematical education, but that doesn't seem to be treated like it's some kind of big problem.

I am in a country where at University you only take courses for your major, by the way. So as a Biology student I could only take Biology/Chemistry/Physics/Maths, while a Philosophy major would have only taken courses in Philosophy/History/Theology for example.

[spaceoperadiva]

I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven. A young vicar is assigned to a remote aboriginal village in British Columbia in the early/mid-twentieth century. It's a story about living a calling, and learning to deal with life, love, and death.

[emperor]

Wit? Or will they all have discussed it with you already?

Stand on Zanzibar?

[samskeyti]

Rebecca Goss "Her Birth". Her website discusses a reading she gave to med students recently. Frank Huyler " The Blood of Strangers", Jason Shinder "Stupid Hope" and the short stories by Chris Adrian. Adrian and Huyler are medics and Shinder was a cancer patient. These books are all short and intense, so you will get engagement from the time-pressured.

There's an anthology edited by Lavinia Greenlaw on medical and body related poems. I got a copy from the Wellcome shop, can't recall the title.

Danielle Ofri at Bellevue NY would be a great contact person. I can give you more ideas later, if you want. (Kind of my field, or one of them.)

[redbird]

I think this may be another case of self-selecting subgroups: doctors and scientists who read for pleasure/outside their specialities are likely to spend time with each other, and to get to know people other than doctors and scientists who also read for pleasure. Doctors who don't may be socialising mostly with other doctors, or with doctors who share their recreational interests, whether it's playing in a string quartet or watching cricket. The person who knows a doctor from a string quartet is likely to think "of course doctors care about music."

[seekingferret]

Is that in itself something that needs to be fixed?

It's a matter of perspective. If you think the arts teach valuable skills that are essential to being a good scientist, maybe. (And maybe liberal arts majors should be taught that mathematical learning is also lifelong.) One of the courses in my college career I am most grateful for is an elective opera appreciation course. I don't know if it made me a better person, but it taught me that I like opera, which I otherwise probably wouldn't have learned. I mean, requiring them to read one extra novel as part of medical school doesn't make it seem like they think it's a big problem, either. Just a small problem worth offering the students an extra tool to deal with.

[green_knight]

Terry Pratchett is the obvious recommendation; the usual suspects for people who *do* read occasionally, and Science of Discworld for people who aren't much into fiction.

[chickenfeet]

I'm going to suggest John LeCarré; particularly the recent stuff. Assuming most of your med students are going to end up in the NHS they need to understand how deep bureaucracies actually work and the choices they impose on people who work within them. LeCarré is accurate and truly scary.

[boxofdelights]

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Nonfiction about the life of the woman whose cancer created the HeLa cell line, and her family. Has interesting things to say about how doctors treat patients, how researchers treat subjects, who owns intellectual property and why, and racism in America.

[wychwood]

Elizabeth Moon's Speed of Dark has an autistic protagonist and really addresses the idea of whether "curing" autism is something people should try for, and pros and cons of being non-neurotypical. Might be a good one?

[naath]

Well, I think the Just City does a good take-down of Plato's assumption that humans don't have to be all... messy, and human. It just comes to mind having so recently read it.

I've been watching Call the Midwife (it's based on a book I haven't read) which is all about the more... human... side of health care.

Ursula Le Guin's many novels always seem to have a lot to say about the human condition.

PTerry is genius at playing with story-tropes to great effect (although I worry that one has to have read more of the things that play them straight to "get" it? I don't know. I'd start with Tiffany anyway, Tiffany is great. Even if the books are YA. Means it's easy and quick to read).

[rysmiel]

I was going to recommend this one, it's a very good POV and characterisation and it's thoughtful and thought-provoking about an angle of thing I would hope doctorlings should be considering but can see that they might not, necessarily.

[rysmiel]

People with a liberal arts education also usually do that at the expense of a scientific and mathematical education, but that doesn't seem to be treated like it's some kind of big problem.

It's certainly not treated as being as big a problem as it actually is, alas.

[davidgillon]

The other good point with Lock In is that it looks at how society others disabled people, and explicitly addresses disablism ranging from petty attitudinal issues, through delibrate access discrimination and on up to physical assault. I'm not convinced many of the doctors and other medics I've dealt with have the first clue about this aspect of disability.

For non-fiction (and this is a rec for everyone, not just the baby-docs), Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, Katharine Quarmby - which starts with a survey of historical attitudes to disability in the UK, but then specifically focuses on contemporary disability hate crime.