Language: English

A last act of intimate kindness

"I had barely seen my brother in decades, but when time was short, he let me in." In the "Modern Love" section of the NYT, a woman describes the tenderness and connection of caring for a younger brother she was mostly estranged from through his death from cancer. She's surprised at how positive and touching it is to reconnect with him under such difficult circumstances. The story could be used to prompt discussion of end-of-life care. The brother declines aggressive treatment and his sister is with him when he dies at home. This narrative is also available in Spanish under the title, "Un último acto de amabilidad íntima."

Survivor of White House Lightning Strike Embraces third chance at life

A graduate student canvassing near the White House on 8/4/22 for a nonprofit humanitarian group (International Rescue Committee - aids people in disaster zones) was one of four people hit by a lightning strike in Lafayette Park. She was the only one to survive, despite her heart stopping twice, the second time for more than 10 minutes. She ponders the meaning of being the one to survive the experience and describes the horrible pain from burns and nerve damage that she's still suffering from. Focuses on gratitude, learned from her aunt and uncle who died of cancer years ago but were grateful to be alive up until the end.

Penn State Collection of Graphic Medicine Narratives

Organized by each year the class has been taught, this is collection of graphic narratives illustrates issues medical students face with details of med school life: imposter syndrome, harsh criticism, feeling insecure vs thinking they can save a patient's life if they go with their instincts, etc. Amazing range of writing and drawing styles, very candid, some quite powerful. Some use medical terminology beyond interest or understanding of lay reader.

As a physician, why write?

This is the first post in a new blog on U Mass Med School Medical Humanities Lab, 2019. It is an articulation of why all physicians are storytellers and why most would do well to write them down. This could be beneficial for medical students to reflect upon in order to show the importance of health narratives to new physicians.

The Hidden Dying of Doctors: What the Humanities Can Teach Medicine and Why We All Need Medicine to Learn It

This review of Kalanithi's "When breath becomes air" focuses most on the opening story of a young colleague who took his own life, the problem of medical student and physician suicide/ depression/burnout, and how humanities education could alleviate the suffering of doctors by connecting them with the human side of medicine, their own and that of patients. This is very useful as a first-week reading in a Foundations of Health Humanities course or as a reference for a talk to aspiring med students

It’s the ‘life’ in end-of-life that matters

Prompted by Atul Gawande's New Yorker essay ("Letting Go," which addresses similar themes as his book, Being Mortal), the author reflects on two experiences he had as a resident in the NICU, one in which all possible medical treatment was pursued inappropriately and another in which extra-ordinary measures were not applied so that a family could spend a final day with a fatally ill newborn. The author blames the broader medical system, and says his frustrations with that system led him to his current occupation as a health services researcher. In contrast to end-of-life stories that involve elderly patients or terminally ill adults, this blog post provides vivid examples of NICU treatment decision-making.

Letting go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

Tells several of the wrenching stories from his book (Being Mortal), making points about medicine's reluctance to stop treatment and acknowledge the patient is dying, even when the chance of improvement is slim to none. "Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions--and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left." 13 pps; suitable for undergrads, professional students, maybe medical students; describes hospice treatments and misconceptions about hospice.

Speaking of Addiction

Dr. Meaghan Ruddy speaks on the importance of the language that health care providers choose to talk about drug addicts, specifically opioid addicts. She shares her story of when she critiqued the label "drug-seekers" in an emergency department that had many such cases. Dr. Ruddy then calls for a focus on destigmatization for drug addiction in future generations of medical professionals. Relevant to pre-med, medical students.

Tourette Syndrome: The biomedical and the literary.

The blog "According to the Arts" is written for the general public. The posts juxtapose a medical description of an illness or disability, in this case Tourette Syndrome, with a novel in which one of the main characters exhibits the condition. The novel captures the signs and symptoms, and describes how Tourette syndrome can affect lives of people living with Tourette and of living with someone who has it. The biomedical text from a neurology journal describes the characteristic tics and behaviors. Comparing the story to the medical account shows the science vs humanities perspectives on illness and could be useful for undergraduate classes in health humanities, especially ones focused on writing. Also useful for health professions students and professionals to emphasize the human factors often missed in clinical encounters.

Intoxicated by My Illness, and Other Writings on Life and Death

The link is a review by J. Russell Teagarden of a book by Anatole Broyard, who died of prostate cancer but used his illness as a way to reflect on literature and illness (and literature and medicine). Teagarden explains that the book is "a collection of writings concerning illness and death, mostly his, and in particular, the metastatic prostate cancer that took [Broyard's] life at age seventy." The book is not a chronology of Broyard's illness but, instead, a collection of his New York Times articles, his notes and early drafts of writings, and a talk he gave at the University of Chicago medical school. Two subjects in particular might be used in a class. One is an approach to thinking about terminal illness. As Teagarden explains, "The book begins with the first of many counterintuitive notions Broyard offers when he refers to being intoxicated by his illness. With the diagnosis, he 'is filled with desire—to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.' (p. 4) Broyard is not just intoxicated by his illness; 'I’m infatuated with my cancer.' He is not doomed as much as he is freed; 'I can afford now, I said to myself, to draw conclusions.' (pp. 6-7). Likewise, the idea of meeting death with style is a theme across the book. The book also addresses the relationship between literature and illness; as Teagarden states, "he considers the literature of illness, the literature for illness, and the literature of death." The book includes passages in which Broyard tells the story of his illness, and the story of his father's illness (both died of prostate cancer).