title: Poetry for the uninitiated: Dannie Abse's "X-Ray" in an undergraduate medicine and literature class.
abstract: I recently taught an upper-division Honors class in Medicine and Literature with students ranging from a pre-physician's assistant student and nursing student to English, French, History, and Technical Writing majors. The common thread connecting these students initially was their self-described fear of and helplessness with poetry. However, as the semester drew to a close, their class discussion and journals revealed not only increased comfort with poetry but also a preference for it. The information and insight they got from poetry, they said, were the reason they took a medical humanities course in the first place and commented that the poetry we read provoked more substantial "medicine and literature" discussions than prose. Poetry provides a good starting place to analyze complex human relationships, and the focus on language and form levels the intellectual playing field: students are all unfamiliar with how to do it and are learning a new skill together. This could be accomplished, of course, with a literary short story, but for the diverse population of students in this class, the brevity of poetry made it all the more appealing.
authors: Weber State University, 1404 University Circle, Ogden, UT, 84408-1404, USA, sshigley@weber.edu.
authors: Sally Bishop
authors: SB
authors: Shigley
mesh_terms: D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D011037:Poetry as Topic