Unalterable Testimony: Aesthetic Experience in Poetry and Medical Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The interplay of art and medicine is centuries long. In contemporary medical education, “arts and humanities” relevant to medical practice are often instrumentalized and justified in curriculum to “improve” training, increasing empathy, for example. The aesthetic pleasure of engaging with art is less considered. In this essay, as a family physician, I reflect on my aesthetic experience of poetry as a gateway to consider the possibility of aesthetic experience in clinical practice. As I tarry with language in a poem, new horizons of understanding are extended. In a similar way, in clinical practice, when I allow my senses to experience a patient aesthetically, be it by seeing, smelling, touching, I can enter a new appreciation of their personhood. Using a combination of poetry and visual art, I draw on an example of an older man, unstably housed, to elucidate how experiencing arts and humanities in medical practice can answer what Gadamer called the first task of medicine, that is to restore a person to their original state.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".