Submission Medium: written

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.

La crisis de agua potable en Uruguay

This NPR podcast examines a health issue that often goes overlooked: access to potable water. The water crisis plagued a town in Montevideo Uruguay for three months. This coincided with one of the worst droughts in 40 years. This podcast focuses on how the water shortage affected children at a school in Salinas which is a small town. It explores health problems grounded in infrastructure. It features personal stories and experiences of the students through interviews that show the how lack of access to potable water affects children. Transcript available in Spanish will help intermediate learners follow spoken language.

Un chispazo de conexión humana

Agus Morales describes his visit to Faiz, a man from Pakistan, in the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes Faiz’s shock when he speaks to him in Urdu as he had not spoken his native language since he first arrived at the hospital. The story highlights human connections that can grow from shared language, both speaking and being understood in a medical setting. This is a part of a collection that includes visual as well as written narratives regarding experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Useful for medical Spanish classes, well-told story that will resonate with general composition students, good example of a health narrative for humanities-driven upper division courses. Intermediate level, 1-2 pages.

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.

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.

The Desperate Son

Witnessing his father's decline from cancer, an oncologist wrestles with his own fears and desperation. The story illustrates what happens when roles are flipped and a health professional finds himself at the centre of a family health crisis. What would you, as a health professional, do when faced with a similar situation? The story could be used to promt discussion about care at end of life and provider-patient communication.