The humanities and clinical science are two sides of the same coin. Without either, our care for patients would be incomplete.
National University of Singapore (NUS) Med&Lit, or NUS Medicine and Literature Society in full, is a student interest group founded in 2016 to introduce the medical humanities to students. Here at NUS Med&Lit, we recognise the difficulty in comprehending each patient's illness as our own, and aim to tap on literature as a conduit through which we may understand human experiences in the medical field.
Thus far, NUS Med&Lit has reached out to medical students through various sessions, including:
- Discussion on Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning with Dr Derek Heng from National University Hospital (NUH) Department of Emergency Medicine
- Lecture on Medicine in Literature, Art and Music by Prof Kua Ee Heok from NUH Department of Psychiatry
- Dialogue with A/Prof Philip lau on his book The Long Ride from Singapore, a serious reflection on breast cancer masquerading as a humorous travel memoir
- Movies and Psychiatry with Changi General Hospital's Department of Psychiatry
- Outing to watch Grandmother Tongue, a play by WILD RICE on the generation gap and how language isolates yet connects
- Discussion with A/Prof Susan Ang from NUS Department of Literature on the depiction of disease in poetry
- Open mic showcase of poetry and prose by our own NUS Med&Lit members
We believe our activities serve as a reminder of the importance of providing patient-centric care beyond an axiom and that empathy ought to go beyond a buzzword.
While NUS Med&Lit is still young, the support we have received has been beyond our expectations. This, perhaps, is a showing of the untappec desire for the humanities in medicine, a gap that cannot be bridged by the wholly scientific. While compassion is emphasised by its showing, we should aim instead for its being.
Follow us on Instagram @med.lit or contact us at nusmedlit@gmail.com