We tend to assume that medical students will need to read in order to develop their clinical skills through familiarizing themselves with textbooks, lecture notes, and peer reviewed articles. Reading can assist in the development of clinical skills in other ways- clinical skills such as compassion, understanding, empathy, and comfort with ambiguity. Accomplished physicians such as Dr. William Osler also emphasized the importance of reading works in the humanities as a way of developing a full understanding of the human condition among medical students.
For instance, Dr. Osler recommended that medical students keep copies of these ten books by their bed and read for fifteen minutes or so every evening:
- Plutarch’s Lives
- Religio Medici
- Shakespeare
- Montaigne
- Marcus Aurelius
- Epictetus
- Don Quixote
- Emerson
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Old and New Testaments
How does reading assist in developing a complete human being, such as is described by Francis Bacon, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” How does reading fill people with ideas?