Medicine and the arts. Three poems (excerpt) by Emily Dickinson. Commentary.

摘要

Hope springs eternal in the human breast." So wrote Alexander Pope1 in his long poem, "An essay on man." Perhaps "eternal" hope is too lofty an aspiration, but experience teaches that hope is very durable. Doctors have long considered hope an effective tool in reducing the suffering of illness. In fact, doctors traditionally manipulated hope as part of their prescribed regimen for critically and terminally ill patients. Their principal method of doing so was to modulate disclosure of information about prognosis because, they argued, telling a patient the truth could be devastating.