Medicina, Cine y Literatura: una experiencia docente en la Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

Abstract

            In Spain, it is commonly held that medical students spend the entire time of their degree courses obsessed with the MIR (Post-graduate Medical Training/ Medical Residency) exam and, when they have sat and passed this, the health system itself together with excessive professional activity foster   what is tantamount to a “hyperspecialisation”, in many cases in detriment to “learning to read” the patient as a complete entity. Upon exercising their profession, physicians should understand patients in their entirety since medicine –when considered as ethical humanism- fails if the patient is merely slotted into the “specialist” pigeon-hole. At the Teaching Unit of the Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona we were prompted to incorporate a subject in the syllabus that would allow students to “both read and see medicine” to an extent far beyond the diagnostic level, that would  provide them with a broader view of diseases, and one that that would become an emotional complement to the material studied in their degree course (and as a direct consequence, to their future profession), which tends to be excessively “biologistic”. What, then, could be better than literature and the cinema to teach students to “read and see medicine”? From previous knowledge that we had culled from other university programs, this would not only be a novel subject per se but should also offer a completely different learning model from traditional teaching contents in the field. This would thus approach the situation in other degree courses, such as in business studies, where similar subjects and models are used.