Cubism and the Medical School Curriculum

Abstract

The rationales for including the medical humanities in the medical school curriculum are well accepted; in many schools the medical humanities are well established. Yet, pedagogical questions remain, and those who teach in such programs and others like them in health care settings find themselves ill-equipped to conceptualize curricular and instructional issues unique to humanistic inquiry in medical settings. This article identifies one such conceptual framework: using cubism as a metaphor to think about the medical humanities curriculum, in this case, imaginative literature portraying death and dying. The author uses Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, and Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle to illustrate how literary inquiry might enable medical students and other health care providers to think about the lives of their dying patients from multiple perspectives.