Health Story Type: Book

Imagine What It’s Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology

This wide-ranging anthology includes literature from a variety of historical periods, genres, and authors (a range that includes John Milton, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Louisa May Alcott, and Dylan Thomas as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, Rachel Naomi Remen, and Rafael Campo). It is organized by topics, including the experience of illness, beginnings and endings (on death and birth), trauma and recovery, coming to terms (on the time "after catastrophe, diagnosis, rescue or death," and healing costs (the experiences of caregivers, both professional and familial). In addition to 65 works (most of them 2 to 5 pages in length), the volume also includes a list of "suggested longer readings" and "notes on authors and selections."

Between the Heartbeats: Poetry & Prose by Nurses

This collection of writing includes a diverse range of international voices. They address a variety of experiences of care, including in-patient, out-patient and home care. As the title indicates, the collection spans poetry, brief stories, and reflections, all previously published elsewhere and collected here. In the Foreward, Joanne Trautman Banks observes that the works addresses not only personal experience but also reflections on the limitations of the profession.

Medicine, Meaning, and Identity: Essays from Early-Career Physicians

A female resident navigates modern dating. A critical care doctor becomes one of the first physicians in the United States to contract COVID-19. A pediatrician reflects on her father's passing during her final year of medical school. A Muslim surgeon contemplates whether residency has replaced his faith. An orthopedic surgeon wonders, after a decade of training, if he made the right choices after the death of his brother-in-law. An African American resident painfully asks: Do Black lives truly matter to white coats? For decades, medical humanists have advocated for attending to patients as "whole persons." So, too, the time has come to see physicians as "whole persons." In this urgent, moving collection of essays, a diverse group of early-career physicians write about common experiences in medicine--such as the grueling nature of internship and residency--from a fresh, up-to-date perspective. With particular attention how to the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity influence clinicians' experiences as caregivers, the featured practitioner-authors reflect on endurance, suffering, and the politics of wellness across their personal and professional lives, delicately capturing a new dimension of healthcare previously unfamiliar to wider audiences. Medicine, Meaning, and Identity invites readers to reconsider the doctor not as a hero, but rather as a complex, whole person; not merely as a healer, but as an integral community member in acute need of healing.

The tennis partner

Abraham Verghese is a bestselling novelist (Cutting for Stone; The Covenant of Water) and this memoir is written with elegance as deep as his medical expertise as an internist. The story of his close relationship with a medical student whose life unravels through addiction gives profound insight into physicians who struggle with addiction (like anyone else, but also quite differently). His role as a teacher and mentor for medical students gives an up close view of what medical education can be: sensitive and humane, without denying how much physicians must learn under often-stressful conditions. Pre-health professions students, medical students and graduate health humanities courses committed to reading the whole book would find much to discuss about both those issues. I used Chapter 11, an extended examination of and conversation with a patient, hospitalized for various complications of being both a heroin addict and unhoused, to talk through humanistic approaches to medical care with undergraduates.

Skin & Bones

Skin & Bones is Renée Watson’s novel about the experiences of Lena, a 40-year-old African American woman in predominantly white Portland, Oregon. Health, body image, weight, diet, and beauty standards are prominent topics throughout the book and these are contextualized within larger themes about race, gender, gentrification, work, love, faith, and friendship. There are many passages in the book that show how beliefs about health are communicated through interactions with Lena’s friends, family, romantic partners, co-workers, and service providers. For example, the book opens with a chapter entitled, “the weight I carry,” that problematizes assumptions about health and weight in an interaction with a healthcare provider. Lena’s observations about the interaction (e.g., the too-small gown, unfounded assumptions and problematic statements from the health care provider) are woven with reflections on her lifeworld. Immediately following this chapter is a brief reflection on “morbid” as a word used in relation to weight; it concludes with the statements, “Comment on my appearance. But tell yourself it’s about my health.” Health-related themes are prominent enough that one might assign the entire book and this would provide opportunities to see "big" or "fat" as an identity that intersects with race and gender and to discuss health themes in relation to sex, social support, family, and community. However, the book is also written in chapters (some only a paragraph long) that could be excerpted to explore specific topics. For example:

the aforementioned “the weight I carry” and “morbid” focus on a health care interaction
“Sunday supper” includes a reference to a mother who died from a failure to diagnose breast cancer because she was “a poor Black woman”
“shopping while fat” and “back to school shopping” address finding plus-sized clothing
“macro microaggressions” details lunch with younger white co-workers and concludes with the line, “...they sat there and basically admitted—in my presence—that of all the cares and worries to have in life, their greatest fear is having a body that looks like mine.”
“aunt Aretha” examines “soul food” and its complicated connections to health, family, race, and class
A sequence of chapters--“fat girl, dance,” “how whiteness killed the body positive movement” (an excerpt from Kelsey Miller), “debriefing,” “positivity,” “positive,” and “body positivy” address how fat acceptance intersects with race and this is taken up later in two chapters describing Lena and her friends’ experience at a “Fat Girl Wellness Conference”

One especially powerful recurring storyline involves messages about self-acceptance, health, and diet that Lena received from her own mother and what she communicates with her daughter. These are difficult chapters and include a near overdose on diet pills that is initially taken as a suicide attempt. A strong bond between Lena, her mother, and her daughter sustains them and the book addresses the complexities of communicating about health, race, gender, and beauty in our personal relationships.

Para vivir con salud: Leyendo la salud y la literatura.

This open-access resource describes itself this way: "Para vivir offers an introduction to reading different literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world with a thematic focus on health. It can be used as an alternative to the standard Introduction to Hispanic Literature course texts, as it also teaches techniques of close reading. It incorporates authors from seventeen counties, has an almost even representation of male and female authors and diverse communities in the Hispanic world (European, Creole, Afro Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Jewish). In addition to introductions to reading different genres (narrative, poetry, theater, and film) we have scaffolded supporting material such as biographies, notes on the historical contexts, pre and post-reading questions." Although framed in terms of its uses for literature courses, the literary selections here could be incorporated into many other intermediate and higher level Spanish courses in which reading and composition are central activities. Much primary source material is included in the book itself; when not available due to copyright, there are suggestions on how instructors might be able to access them on their own. Beyond the readings themselves, the book includes a great deal of pedagogical material (introduction to genres and reading strategies), a bibliography that introduces health humanities and links literature to the work of health professionals; ideas for syllabus construction. It is downloadable.

“Rosario Tijeras” Jorge Franco

"Rosario Tijeras" by Jorge Franco is a Colombian novel that explores the world of drug trafficking and its impact on individuals. The story follows Rosario as she grapples with the trauma of sexual abuse, which has driven her into a life of crime within the violent drug trade. The novel also delves into Rosario's mental health and the relationships she forms. Additionally, it sheds light on the effects of child sexual abuse and the physical toll of her criminal lifestyle as they lead to hospitalization. Undergraduates would be highly motivated by the storyline, dialect and characters. 160 pages, only available in print or electronic (paid) edition, but inexpensive ($10 used) and readily available.

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

"A Body, Undone" is a memoir by Christina Crosby, an English professor chronicling her life after a paralyzing cycling accident in 2003. A respected English professor at Wesleyan University, Crosby explores the physical and emotional pain of her disability through a critical feminist and queer thinking lens. She puts into words the experience of life in a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding, discussing how we construct a livable life in the midst of unimaginable pain. She situates her personal narrative within the broader social critiques of care labor and the financial burden of disability and injury within the current economic systems and structures in the US. The novel would be relevant to disability studies and feminist theory, but its prose that is rooted in humanity and the events of daily life function to make it accessible to a general audience . This book is a patient narrative that challenges the dominant discourse of disability, and could be relevant to discussions about disability, pain, and care and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and class.

Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

This graphic memoir captures the author's journey with her mother, Alice, who is diagnosed with dementia. Through a creative blend of writing, visual art, and comics, Walrath weaves elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland throughout the text to explore the transformative power of storytelling in navigating the challenges of mental illness, loss, and social stigma. The memoir offers a unique perspective on aging and caregiving, emphasizing the healing potential of graphic narratives by speaking to how visual mediums can communicate more than, or differently from, written text. Collaged illustrations, made in part from Carroll’s text itself, are accompanied by a textual vignette. The combination of text and art results in a cohesive narrative that would lack the same depth and detail if considered in isolation. Graphic medicine, Walrath writes, “lets us better understand those who are hurting, feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate those social boundaries.” Aliceheimer's provides a way to introduce and educate people about Alzheimer’s as a medical condition, while highlighting the humanity involved in dealing with it as a family. This novel could be used in classes regarding narrative medicine, graphic medicine, and/or caregiving experiences. It invites discussions on the role of storytelling in reshaping medical narratives, the impact of stigma on health, and the potential for creative expression in coping with complex health challenges. With Walrath’s background in Medical Anthropology, this book could also be used to ask how researchers personally connect to their work.

Taking Turns

Taking Turns is a graphic novel that explores HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 at the Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. Through archival records, oral histories, and MK Czerwiec's first-hand experiences as a nurse on the ward, the novel sheds light on the challenges and resilience of the community during this critical period. With simple illustrations and a practical four-panel format, "Taking Turns" delivers a direct and accessible narrative, offering readers an opportunity to not only absorb the history easily, but prompting empathetic reflection for each member of the community – patients, families, and medical staff. This novel could provoke discussions about caregiver narratives, and the efficacy of graphic novels in communicating narrative.