Medicine may be defined as human research to achieve disease prevention and health maintenance. Medicine needs to be based on scientific evidence, but physicians need to remain humanistic through humanities. The medical humanities are designed to overcome the separation of disease(s) (scientific medicine) from human (humanistic medicine) and to improve interdisciplinary harmony to optimize medical care. The identity and effective practice of medicine needs human understanding through literature. As in the example of literary symbolism of obesity, literature is an important channel for comprehensively understanding obesity.

Keywords: Medicine, Literature, Obesity, Literary symbolism

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