Beyond Empathy to System Change: Four Poems on Health by Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor” is frequently cited as a means of raising awareness among health workers of the effects of living and working conditions upon health. Less cited is his trilogy of poems entitled Call to Arms which calls for class-based action to transform the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many. In this article we show how “A Worker’s Speech”, with its plea for empathy for the ill, contrasts with the more activist and often militant tone of the Calls to Arms Trilogy: “Call to a Sick Communist”, “The Sick Communist’s Answer to the Comrades”, and “Call to the Doctors and Nurses”. We also show that while “A Worker’s Speech” has been applied in the training of health workers, its accusatorial tone towards health workers’ complicity in the system the poem is critiquing risks alienating them. In contrast, the Call to Arms Trilogy seeks common ground, inviting these same workers into the broader political and social fight against injustice. While we contend that the description of the sick worker as a “communist” risks estranging these health workers, our analysis of the Call toAction poems nevertheless indicates their use can contribute to move health workers’ educational discourse beyond a laudable but fleeting elicitation of empathy for the ill towards a structural critique and deeper systemic understanding in order to prompt action by health workers to reform or even replace the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many.