Imagine doctors, nurses, hospital trustees, administrators, lab techs, and physicians’ assistants meeting to talk about a book or short story they had all just read and reflecting on what it meant to them as professionals engaged in health care.

This scene has taken place in 25 of Maine’s 38 hospitals in recent years, involving more than 750 health care professionals, thanks to the Maine Humanities Council’s Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®. This year, under the Council’s guidance, the program has gone national, expanding to the rest of the New England states as well as Illinois, Utah, and North Carolina.

What difference does it make?

Here is what one hospital vice president has concluded:

"It is difficult to articulate how this relatively simple concept of bringing people together to share has made a lasting and transformational impact on our small rural hospital and our surrounding communities. To quote Thoreau, ’Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?’"

Medicine technology is dazzling, but the quality of communication between patient and caregiver has generally declined. Often, the two parties are strangers, separated by differences of religion, age, culture, or education. Literature, on the other hand, offers rich vicarious experiences-of illness, death, grief, suffering, confusion-which can, in Thoreau’s phrase, help us see the world through the eyes of another. Hence the importance of the humanities in modern medical education and the growing appreciation of what is called "narrative medicine"-basically, the skill to listen to the patient’s story.

Literature & Medicine is a practical application of these ideas, not in medical schools but in the busy everyday world of local hospitals. "The results have been remarkable," says project coordinator Elizabeth Sinclair. "Participants report better communication with patients and colleagues, a breaking down of hierarchies within the hospital staff, deeper understanding of how different cultural or ethnic perspectives affect health care, and greater satisfaction with their work, leading to less burn out."

"Just last week on the orthopedic floor," reports Dr. Geoffrey Gratwick, who started the series at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, "I was standing with a maintenance man and a psychiatrist and we all just started talking about The Odyssey. It was a chance to talk about the larger issues so that we’re not waylaid by the more mechanical functions of medical care."

From a different perspective, Dr. Lesley Fernow, an internist in Dover-Foxcroft, found in Lori Alvord’s The Scapel and the Silver Bear the clue to understanding a Native American patient who, nearing death, was having hallucinations. "My normal physician self would have said, "OK, I’ll give you something for that. But because of the readings I knew enough to ask him if they were good hallucinations or bad. He had seen a bear coming to his bed at night. He was happy for the visions because the bear signified strength."

Last fall, "Lit & Med" won a national award for excellence from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Thanks to funding from the Society for Arts in Healthcare and Johnson & Johnson, the Council will offer a national institute to train scholar-facilitators in five additional states. To keep in touch with the project, visit its new e-newsletter, Synapse, which begins this month.