Language: English

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.

Patient Stories – People Managing Chronic Conditions

The Agency for Clinical Innovation is an Australian organization seeking to promote innovation and implementation of innovation in healthcare. Their site offers a range of resources including narratives, networks, and information. Under the resources tab, they offer five patient stories about managing chronic illness with the stated purpose: “These patient story videos highlight the importance of self-management and coordinated care to support people living with chronic conditions.” One of the featured videos titled “Kay’s Story,” provides an interview of Kay describing her experience and relationship with chronic illness, specifically diabetes, Graves’ Disease, and COPD. These diagnoses led to Kay developing agoraphobia, a fear of leaving one’s home or going outside. She reached out for help and support through the Aboriginal Medical Service, which provided her with steps to begin building confidence in going out, and self-managing her chronic illness and agoraphobia. The tone of the video is uplifting and positive, and she describes how this support allowed her to overcome her agoraphobia and begin practicing and advocating for self management. Brief stories useful for undergraduates, especially pre-health majors. Also community groups looking for ideas to promote wellness.

Family silence around disability complicates brothers’ bond

In this brief interview, Terrence Ho describes his relationship with his brother Torrance, who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy as a child and passed away at the age of 37. The interview addresses family relationships, cultural stigma, and Terrence's roles as caregiver and advocate for this brother. Terrence also describes Torrance's talents as an artist and power wheelchair hockey goalie. Terrence has advice for other siblings about how to manage family dynamics, emotional stress, and patient advocacy. The interview reveals what an important role siblings play over time when a child has a degenerative condition, and also speaks to the difficulty parents may have in talking to children about their brother’s or sister’s disabilities. There are several mentions of types of health care and services that were provided or that would have been useful. This brief story provides insight into challenges and rewards of the sibling relationship, one that is often overlooked. It could be used to prompt discussions about family caregiving, family communication, and ways health care providers can support family caregivers.

Case Report

"Case Report" document's the author's simultaneous experiences of being a medical student and sexual assault survivor. It moves through the aftermath of the trauma living solidly in two worlds, as an insider and outsider of healthcare. This brief story describes numerous interactions with a range of health care providers, as well as interactions that occur with friends, a pharmacist, patients, and others. By showing examples of unhelpful and helpful ways people responded to a sexual assault survivor, this story can prompt important discussions about compassionate care and social support. It also provides insight into how a provider's own traumatic experiences inform their approach to medical care. Some of the interactions in the story are difficult to read so advance notice may be appropriate with some audiences.

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.

Less? a film of personal stories from people who have experienced and overcome homelessness

This 12.5 minute video by Britain's NHS interweaves stories of four people who experienced homelessness and are now housed. Included in their stories are accounts of ways they felt dehumanized and stigmatized in health care settings, as well as small acts of caring that encouraged them to seek help and experience self-worth. Several of the stories also speak about substance use disorders and provide context for understanding how they may be intertwined with homelessness. For example, Viv speaks about how terrifying it is to sleep outdoors and Jamesy's story includes discussion of how his drug use and homelessness were precipitated by several traumatic events that happened in a short time period. One of the stories mentions an averted suicide attempt. The video is brief enough to be used in a class, and could be paired with other materials that document the connections between homelessness, health care access, and risk of chronic and fatal health conditions (see, for example, Denise's Last Days, published February 20, 2023 in Slate Magazine: https://slate.com/technology/2023/02/trauma-aware-care-homelessness-hope.html).

How to Find Health Narratives: TikTok

This document provides a detailed description of how to navigate the social media platform, TikTok, and how to find health narratives within the app.

Body of Work

Anna Dovre's story "Body of Work" is a meditation on the various ways she has encountered death through her medical education: learning to intubate on a cadaver, witnessing death in the emergency department, sitting with a hospice patient. Her essay reflects on the ways death is experienced and understood in the process of medical education and the connections and disconnections with one's own understanding of mortality. She starts her reflection with a description of her practice time in a cadaver lab and the physical benchmarks for competency when performing an autopsy. The following section about her time as a hospice companion juxtaposes personal experience with a discussion of clinical terms for ways and stages of dying. "To die actively means the pauses between breaths lengthen and stutter; the mind slips into unconsciousness; the skin begins to mottle into starbursts of purple and blue. To die inactively—well, that becomes a question of semantics, of philosophy." The story raises questions about how we honor life and make one's last moments and after death a respectful and respected process. How can we, as the living, be more appreciative of the gift of life while caring for those around us? This quotation, "If anything, the scene on the table has become more gruesome, but perhaps that has rendered her less real, less human to me," from after the autopsy is a stark realization that will inspire feelings and emotions in readers.