Abraham Nussbaum

Physician, Teacher, Writer


The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler

Genre is a strategy, Altschuler reminds us, and medicine has negotiated epistemic crises with a range of genres. Holmes made sense of anesthesia by writing novels. Rush imagined the sympathetic system as the republic. Poe negotiated epidemics with the Gothic. Altschuler reminds that we praise empiricism, but neglect the role of inspiration. It is fashionable to criticize the Flexner Report and the Progressive Era reforms it crystallized; Altschuler reminds us that it also curtailed the era of medical imagination. In today’s epistemic crisis with medicine, we need more strategies. Here’s a to a return of imagination by prioritizing the humanities in medical education. More genres, more strategies.