ABSTRACT
Reading literature, as in the Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, supplements professional training with “insight transcending” clinical skill. This insight then leads to increased diagnostic accuracy and increased empathy, which increases the meaningfulness of the patient-provider relationship. Poetry was not spoken of as a language of emotion in English class. Rather, it was presented as mathematical designs using words. Since medicine is as much about not-fixing as it is about fixing, poetry is a perfect language for its daily practice for its allowance of the Aesthetic Gaze to accompany the Clinical Gaze.
