Language: English

Pulse- Voices from the Heart of Medicine

Pulse- Voices from the Heart of Medicine is an online publication that features stories, poems, haikus, and visual works from various voices within the healthcare field. Stories come from health care providers in various roles and from patients and family members. For example, “Cultivation Also Starts With C” is a poem that uses the invasive, difficult to remove plant Japanese knotweed as a metaphor for cancer and “Another GSW” details a young doctor’s encounter with a patient who had extensive injuries from a single bullet wound, and how the experience made her consider the ramifications of gun violence in America. Length of items ranges from 40 to 400 words for written works. Each month's issue is on a theme (recent examples included Alone, Coming Undone, Unsung Heros) and the "New Voices" section features "stories by those whose faces and perspectives are underrepresented in media and in the health professions." The website offers several ways to search. For example, one can click through content by year, all the way from 2023 to 2016. When you click on a story, you can also see a lengthy list of “popular tags” that you can click on to search by subject matter. The "visual works" tab includes an option to see a slideshow of submissions, as does the "haikus" tab, which could be helpful for more efficient browsing. Other notable features are that the stories and poems tabs display a phrase from each submission as an attention-getting preview. Similarly, the “more voices” tab displays a themed photograph with each submission.

Difficult Choices

In this 2-minute video from the Youtube channel Story Center, a mother describes the discrimination that she faced for expressing breast milk at work. The narrator draws attention to the discrimination she and many other people who breastfeed faced, and the effect that her decision to breastfeed had on her career--although she successfully pursued a complaint that resulted in compensation and promises to change policy, she ultimately lost her job. "Difficult Choices" provides a succinct example of workplace discrimination against mothers, the legal remedies available, and their limitations. It could prompt discussion about the use of personal stories for advocacy.

A Strange Relativity: Altered Time for Surgeon-Turned-Patient

This is an 8 minute video made by Stanford neurosurgen and author Paul Kalanithi before his death. He reflects on the experience of time--as a physician, seeing patients and monitoring time and now, as a person with cancer and the parent of a baby. The video could be used in a course in which Kalanthi's book is assigned, to give students an opportunity to hear his reflections in his own voice and to see images of him with his family. It is also an example of the larger issue of what physicians notice about medical practice when they become a patient themselves.

Health Narratives syllabus

This is a syllabus for an undergraduate junior/senior level semester-long course at Lewis & Clark College. The course focuses on how stories of health and illness are a place to explore the rhetoric of identities, relationships, health care, and public policy. For example: How do we use narratives to (re)construct identities altered by illness? How can narratives (re)shape interactions between patients and health care providers? What narratives capture public attention and with what implications for health care decision-making and policy? The course covers theories and research on health narratives and narrative research methods. It serves as an overview to this area of research as well as a training ground for doing your narrative research. The course is an elective for students in the Rhetoric & Media Studies major but also draws students from sociology, English, and pre-health. The course is a 25 person seminar-style course for juniors and seniors.

Class outline for teaching Parsons’ Sick Role

Outline for a 60 minute lecture/discussion on Talcott Parsons' concept of "the sick role." Arguments for the significance of patient voice and narrative (e.g., Arthur Frank's Wounded Storyteller) often take Parson's sick role as a point of contrast. Likewise, the practice of narrative medicine by physicians is a rejection of the paternalistic and objective physician that is the counterpart to the "sick patient" in Parson's analysis. The outline is from an upper-division undergraduate course on health narratives offered in a department of Rhetoric & Media Studies (the course also enrolls students studying sociology, English, and pre-health). The class outline provides a very brief background to Parsons' larger project, goes into some detail about the elements of the sick role and the corresponding role of the physician. The session ends with discussion questions about the implications of this concept.

Did a famous doctor’s Covid shot make his cancer worse?

Beyond - and more important than - the medical details, this article raises questions about the power of individual stories, in this instance case studies, of what might be fluke happenings or might be patterns of rare but significant side effects of a vaccine. Deep reflection on what happened when the teller was not just a patient but a scientist, one of several authors on a peer-reviewed article reporting findings in a journal, and how his trajectory would have been lost in a randomized clinical trial but might be quite significant if put together with two or three others with similar progressions. Also significant that his radiologist and co-author was his brother; not everyone has such a keen listener to their health narrative, nor would most people be able to tell them in such detailed and credible ways. Useful for discussions of scientific knowing vs storytelling in e.g. a rhetoric or composition class; science writing (author reflects at the end on her hesitation about writing the story at all, given potential misuses and misstatements of the facts she presents); power of stories; doctors as patients.

Promises Like Dolls

"Promises Like Dolls" is a very short story (123 words) about the experience of multiple miscarriages. The story refers to various objects (dolls, books, flowers, t-shirts, stuffed animals) as a way of reflecting on expectations of motherhood (her own and those of others and of society) and on the grief of miscarriage. It also represents the limits of social support for miscarriage. The story is short enough to be read together in class, both as a reflection on how the experience of medical events is shaped by cultural norms and social experiences and as a prompt for discussing how the author utilizes specific imagery and description to convey (and imply) complex emotions in a very short work.

Fae Kayarian: Physician in Training, Poet in Progress

Fae Kayarian is a poet and medical student who began as a scribe at Harvard Medical School. She has shared her experiences through poetry in the form of an autobiography titled "Journals of a Visitor" and several stand-alone poems. Her website contains eight poems ranging in topics in medicine from her point of view as a bystander and now a student. Generally useful for close reading of poetry. Two poems - "The Color Blue" and "It's been six years" could interest families of patients experiencing loss and dementia. Others would be beneficial for teaching physicians and other health professionals in mentor positions. Her poetry would serve as a reminder of what it's like to be a student and the impact that medical educators have on the future of medicine as mentors.

My body is a cage of my own making

An accessible, 7-8 page excerpt from her book, Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body. Roxane Gay writes about her struggle with her weight and body image. When people commented on her body, refused to sit next to her on planes, or took food out of her grocery cart, Gay struggled to accept, and even love, her body. When she broke her ankle and needed emergency surgery she began to take a healthier approach to living in a larger sized body. Useful for classes and community groups to talk about fat-shaming.

To understand autism, don’t look away

Carina Morillo shares her story as the mother of a son with autism through a TedTalk. The video is in Spanish with English subtitles; a transcript in English and Spanish is available as well. Morillo's 15 year old son, Ivan, was diagnosed when he was two and a half and at that time, his parents did not have access to internet information or expert advice about autism. Morillo describes how she learned to connect with her son through activities he enjoyed and how she learned to appreciate and build upon his strengths, such as a strong visual memory, which became a basis for his communication through images. She describes support from a local grocer who gave her son a job that utilizes his passion for organizing items. Her message is that one does not need to be an expert to be curious and inclusive. Eye contact is a part of the story and a metaphor for inclusion; some autistics might point out that insisting on eye contact can be distracting, even painful. However, the larger point of the story emphasizes valuing autistic abilities and working with their interests to create connection. This story can prompt a discussion that may challenge stereotypes about autism and expert systems of medicalization and treatment.