medical humanities
Patients Need Poetry…And So Do Doctors
Sometimes it is the things we deem least practical that wield the most power. In fact, poetry’s impracticality may be its strength. By being just words on a page, it isn’t expected to pull the weight of chemotherapy, antibiotics, or an MRI machine. So when a poem does pack a punch, we’re often bowled over. More
Creativity in Medicine
“What are you doing creatively these days?” It’s not a question you hear commonly. Medicine is a field with a strong history of creativity, but its daily practice feels less and less creative More
Music Teachers for Doctors?
What if every doctor learned from a music teacher? Could a “coach” bring back the intellectual vibrancy from medical-school days for one doctor, the way a music teacher inspires constant growth? More
Literary Publishing at Bellevue Hospital
Watch a video about literary publishing at the oldest public hospital in the country. The Bellevue Literary Review and the Bellevue Literary Press are the first ever literary publishing ventures in a medical center More
Maladies, Remedies, and Anthologies: Medicine Taken at Its Word
The urge to anthologize seems to be one of those primordial drives, nestled in our genomes alongside the compulsions to eat heartily, imbibe lustily, and slaughter enemies willfully. Or at least that’s how the Greeks appear to have experienced it. More
Chekhov and Public Health
At first glance, it might seem odd that a public health journal would initiate a section about arts and humanities. Public health, after all, deals with populations; it eschews the individual except as it forms one of a group. The creative arts, however, deal almost exclusively with individuals. Literature, in particular, always has a protagonist, and the protagonist is never ‘alcoholics with pancreatitis,’ ‘female prisoners receiving hepatitis B vaccination,’ ‘South Asians with cardiovascular risk factors,’ ‘UK asylum seekers with infectious disease,’ or ‘teenaged asthmatic smokers.’ A protagonist is an individual.
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The Debilitated Muse
Poetry is a supremely sensory art, both in the imagining and in the writing. What happens when the poet faces illness? How is the poetry affected by alterations of the body and mind. More
Dance and Medicine
It was on a desolate winter evening that I escaped from Bellevue. I plunged the last IV of my day into someone’s vein and then hopped on an M-15 bus uptown, pressing my subway token into the slot with both anxiety and relief. I was in the second year of my internal medicine residency training, the middle year, which is marked by what is charitably called a “dip” in motivation. More accurately, it is a pit, a chasm, an abyss, a Stygian marsh. More
A Conversation with Alan Alda and Frank Stella
Danielle Ofri had the honor of appearing with Alan Alda, Frank Stella, Paula Scher, and Nobel Laureate Gunter Blobel in a panel discussion at Rockefeller University. The topic was “Compelled to Create.” More
An Outbreak of Poetry (and Prose) at Bellevue
The waiting area in Bellevue Hospital was full. Every chair was taken. But the people kept streaming in. More chairs had to be brought in. It wasn’t clear if the room could accommodate everyone. This wasn’t the emergency room or the clinic waiting area, however. It was the scene of the Bellevue Literary Review poetry … More
Music and Medicine
The moment has finally arrived. After 3 years of sweating through etudes, scales, and Suzuki practice books, my teacher utters the words that every cello student yearns to hear: “It’s time to start the first Bach suite.” Studying cello as an adult hasn’t been the easiest task. But neither is medicine. More
Resistance–Review of Abba Kovner’s poetry
Abba Kovner–leader of the Vilna ghetto uprising–was also a remarkable poet. His book of poems entitled “Sloan Kettering” is well worth the read for its lessons in history, mortality, medicine, and beauty. More
Poetry Ward
Toxic sock syndrome. That’s the first thing we noticed when we entered the hospital room. For those gentle readers who are not familiar with such sensory assault, toxic sock syndrome is the clinical term for the rank odor that accompanies damp, fetid feet that have seen more street time than shower time. More
Another Birth at Bellevue: A New Literary Magazine
For more than 200 years, as America’s oldest public hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center has seen the gamut of human experience and emotion. Birth and death, healing and sickness, bliss and agony are daily occurrences. And now some doctors and others at Bellevue want to mine those experiences in a new way, with The Bellevue Literary Review. More
