medical humanities
Medical Humanities: The Rx for Uncertainty?
A large part of our medical maturation is facing uncertainty and then accepting it into our fold. This is far harder than memorizing all those rare diseases. The humanities can offer doctors a paradigm for living with ambiguity and even for relishing it. More
A Singular Intimacy
Despite enormous advances in healthcare, patients and caregivers alike are dissatisfied with their experience. So much of medicine has been boiled down to rote algorithms and assembly-line care. Seeking inspiration from the gripping narratives of urban medicine to the unlikely poetry of the ICU, Danielle Ofri probes the most fundamental aspect of medical care—how caregivers and patients connect. More
Poetry in Medicine
When I make rounds with medical students and interns, I’ve often tried to sneak in a poem at the end. It’s not always the most well-received bit of medical teaching, More
Documentary: Why Doctors Write
Ken Browne Productions is excited to launch the film, “Why Doctors Write: Finding Humanity in Medicine.” Danielle Ofri is filmed at Bellevue Hospital along with one of her long-time patients. The film explores storytelling and creativity in medicine. More
Adding Spice to the Slog: Humanities in Medical Training
As soon as we’d finish rounds on the medical wards I’d race to pass out an Anatole Broyard essay in the nanoseconds before dispersal entropy overtook our team. More
Storytelling in Medicine: the Passion and the Peril
So much of medicine is about stories—the ones we hear, the ones we tell, the ones we participate in—that it is no accident that doctors and nurses are attracted to stories. More
Humanities For Science Majors
For one premed, a chance exposure to an unknown sliver of literature sprung open an entirely new world. The unexpected opportunity to steep in the humanities offered me ways to think and write about medicine that I doubt would have been accessible to me otherwise.
More
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.
More
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
