Rejuvenating Medical Education

Book excerpt: Returning to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for inspiration, this book uses these epics as a medium through which we might think imaginatively about key issues in contemporary medicine and medical education. These issues include doctors as heroes, and the legacy of heroic medicine in an age of clinical teamwork, collaboration and a more feminine medicine. The authors challenge ingrained habits in medical education, such as the way we characteristically “train” medical students to communicate with patients and colleagues; the reduction of compassion to the “skill” of empathy; the rote recital of the medical history as a “song”; and the new vogue for “resilience” as response to increasing levels of stress and burnout in the profession. A Homeric lens also shows new ways of thinking about translation of medical lingo into patients’ understanding, the relatively high levels of anger and error shown in clinical interactions, and modern phenomena such as “whistleblowing” in the face of unacceptable error or misbehaviour. While exhaustion and burnout are becoming more common in medicine, the authors ask if a more lyrical, rather than epic and tragic stance, might benefit medical work. Drawing on a wealth of experience in the field, the book promotes a new kind of medicine and medical education fit for the 21st century, but envisages these through the ancient lens of Homer’s two epics. In the heroic glory elaborated in the Iliad and the themes of homecoming and hospitality set out in the Odyssey, Homer provides a narrative arc that is a blueprint of modern medicine’s development from a heroic endeavour to a contemporary collaborative provision of hospitality, where the hospital remains true to its name and doctors engage in work of care rather than “fighting” disease with the hospital as battleground.