Abstract

To provide modest insight into whether or not reading literature helps medical students communicate more effectively in the physician‐patient encounter, I conducted an ethnographic study of medical students taking a required three‐hour literature and medicine course. This article will demonstrate that although these medical students were embedded in the discourse of medicine, reflective writing enabled them to conceive medicine as an interpretive, personal, and idiosyncratic activity rather than as a stagnant diagnosis‐based process.