By Susan
Guibert '87, '93M.A.
Dr. Ken Anderson says symptoms of right-brain atrophy set in
early.
"It begins to develop when we're about 5 or 6 years old, when
we're rewarded largely for knowing things that are scientific
or mathematical." says the nephrology/transplantation surgeon
and vice president of Memorial Health System in South Bend. "Those
rewards, then, build in filters that make us think more and more
like scientists and less and less like well-rounded individuals
-- so by the time we get to medical school, we're rewarded for
thinking inside the box."
Currently, Anderson's right-brain prognosis is excellent as
he and several other physicians nurture their creative sides in
the Med Poets Society, a joint effort between Notre Dame and Memorial
Health System in South Bend.
Formally known as the Memorial-Notre Dame Humanities Project,
the program offers physicians the opportunity to take classes
on campus taught by faculty in the English, music, and film, television
and theatre departments.
Recognizing a growing need among medical professionals to nurture
the skills of empathy and self-reflection, to gain better insight
into suffering and the human condition, a group of physicians
from Memorial Hospital pitched the idea of taking a humanities
class to their foundation board, which agreed to underwrite the
program. Stephen Fredman, chair of Notre Dame's English department,
taught the first class of the Med Poets Society in spring 2004
-- an eight-week poetry and prose course.
"I had no preconceived notions," says Fredman. "I just wanted
to see where they could go with it."
Fredman's first assignment to his new group of students was
to discuss a poem by William Carlos Williams, a widely published
physician/poet.
"There was a particularly challenging passage in the poem, and
I asked the class 'When you read it on your own, what did you
do when you came to that difficult passage?'"
Most said they simply skipped over it. Fredman then fully recognized
the challenge of putting a dozen doctors in a situation where
not understanding is a virtue.
The next assignment: bring to class some of their own poetry
or prose and spend time talking about it. After that session,
Fredman encouraged his students to "dig deeper" with one portion
of their work.
"[W]hen he challenged us to write, to create, that really opened
up a kind of vulnerability we're not used to," Anderson says.
"If someone asks me a question about asthma, I give them an
answer. I have the information and can explain it, knowing that
I could hold my own," says Dr. Gary Fromm, a pulmonology/critical
care specialist and director of Memorial Hospital's intensive
care unit. "But to talk about prose or poetry, let alone write,
I felt ridiculous."
Fredman recognized that the extra step of digging deeper may
have pushed these doctors out their comfort zones, but it opened
up a window of their own intellectual life. "They could talk to
each other in a way that is not usual in a clinical setting, to
work as a group, that sense of collective endeavor.
"Reading a poem is like coming up with a diagnosis -- and allowing
themselves to come up with a collective diagnosis is tricky,"
Fredman adds. "They had the ability to reflect on their own experience,
and that sense of self-discovery helped in patient care."
Anderson says the the classes "changed relationships physicians
have with one another. We recognize a new vulnerability that allows
us to be more human with one another. And with that vulnerability,
that humanness, physicians can be more human with their patients
and patients' families."
Fromm's medical training and specialization in critical care
have put him face-to-face with dying patients -- and their loved
ones -- every day for the past 25 years and forced him to confront
daily those larger, transcendent issues of life, death, compassion
and suffering.
"None of my formal education in the '70s prepared me for dealing
with those issues, but meeting with a medical ethics committee
every month for 20 years began to open my mind to these larger
questions."
Participation in the Med Poets Society, with its discussion
of literature, poetry and the arts, also helped, Fromm says. "I
can better appreciate that guiding a patient through a 'nice death'
is just as important as guiding a patient to a cure."
* * *
(April 2006)
