I love this story of how the novels of Charles Dickens have very precisely described a number of neurological conditions half a century before the medical profession even invented a name for them:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2006/1763460.htm?health

This has been reported by Kerrie Schoffer and is due to be published in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience. 

So at least some medical scientists find time to read novels now, but maybe they should have done that earlier ...