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.