Medscape profile of BLR and Doctor-Writers

by Dina Cheney
Medscape

Twenty-five years ago, Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, a primary care internist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and a few of her fellow doctors there decided to start a health-focused creative writing journal, Bellevue Literary Review (BLR). Back then, “there was lots of writing about health but not a lot about vulnerability, about when the body mutinies on you,” recalled Ofri, also a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City and BLR’s executive director and editor in chief. “Creative writing and creativity are a place to grapple with those shared vulnerabilities that the larger health publishing industry does not address.”

When the doctors ran three small ads in writing magazines asking for submissions, they didn’t expect much of a response. But hundreds of poems and works of fiction and nonfiction on health, illness, and healing flooded in. To launch the magazine, the doctors planned a gala reading event for October 7, 2001. Then 9/11 happened.

The doctor-editors didn’t anticipate many attendees at the gala. Yet more than 100 people came — the crowd was “standing room only,” said Ofri, who has authored several books, most recently, When We Do Harm, and written essays for The New York Times and The New Yorker. “That’s when we knew we were on the right track…. It drove home the point that in moments of vulnerability, people turn to the arts.”

(read the full article on Medscape)