Results in Teaching Materials

Rearranged: An Opera Singer's Facial Cancer and Life Transposed is Kathleen Watt's memoir of her diagnosis and treatment for osteosarcoma.  In an article in Teaching and Learning in Medicine, medical student Emmanuel Greenberg and internal medicine hospitalist Elizabeth Lahti provide a narrative medicine activity using Watt's book. Greenberg and Lahti provide a brief summary of the work, noting how Watts' short chapters narrate jher movement through the healthcare system as well as the day-to-day realities of her illness and the ways it impacts her identity and relationships.  Greenberg and Lahti each reflect on their own responses to Watts' work.  They note that clinicians' own life stories are part of any clinical encounter and they explore (and model) how this kind of self-reflection can improve understanding and patient care.  Their article concludes by identifying a passage from Watts' book and providing brief instructions and writing prompts for a narrative medicine activity.

In February 2025, contributors to the Health Humanities Consortium listserv provided these recommendations in response to a question about readings that would pair well with Atul Gawande's, Being Mortal.

The following works were suggested by various members of the listserv:

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee 
• In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger
• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
• Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
• You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
• I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
• The First Cell by Azra Raza
• Gray Matters by Theodore H. Schwartz
• Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
• The People’s Hospital by Ricardo Nuila
• Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• The Soul of Care by Arthur Kleinman
• Early by Sarah DiGregorio
• Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen
• In Pain by Travis Rieder
• Reverence for Life by Marvin Meyer
• Sentenced to Science by Allen M. Hornblum
• When Winter Came by Mary Beth Sartor Obermeyer
• All that Really Matters by David Weill 
• Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
• The Inevitable Hour by Emily Abel 
• Final exam A surgeon’s reflections on mortality by Pauline W. Chen. 
• In Shock, by Dr. Rana Awdish
• And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.Sharon Kaufman

In addition, Allan Peterkin of the University of Toronto has assembled a Grief and Loss Reading list (in collaboration with the Canadian Grief Alliance). The Graphic Medicine Interactional Collective also has curated a page of comics on end-of-life, entitled Death Panels: Comics and End of Life.

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

A student got interested in patient-provider communication in a part of a course devoted to health narratives. I pulled this together for them as a starting place for them to look further.

This open-access resource describes itself this way:

"Para vivir offers an introduction to reading different literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world with a thematic focus on health. It can be used as an alternative to the standard Introduction to Hispanic Literature course texts, as it also teaches techniques of close reading. It incorporates authors from seventeen counties, has an almost even representation of male and female authors and diverse communities in the Hispanic world (European, Creole, Afro Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Jewish). In addition to introductions to reading different genres (narrative, poetry, theater, and film) we have scaffolded supporting material such as biographies, notes on the historical contexts, pre and post-reading questions."

Although framed in terms of its uses for literature courses, the literary selections here could be incorporated into many other intermediate and higher level Spanish courses in which reading and composition are central activities.  Much primary source material is included in the book itself; when not available due to copyright, there are suggestions on how instructors might be able to access them on their own. Beyond the readings themselves, the book includes a great deal of pedagogical material (introduction to genres and reading strategies), a bibliography that introduces health humanities and links literature to the work of health professionals; ideas for syllabus construction. It is downloadable.

Scholars, educators, patients, students, and anyone interested in medical humanities can search this site for annotated entries that describe works of literature, fine art, visual art and performing art related to medicine. Housed at the NYU School of Medicine, the annotations are written by an editoral board of medical humanities scholars from across North America.

Users of the site can search by words or phrases of their own, peruse an alphabetical index of titles, or use the extensive system of tags.  It is possible to narrow a search to a particular kind of work (e.g., "All visual arts" or just photography, painting/drawing, or sculpture) or to medical humanities topics (e.g., history of medicine, medical anthropology, science and medicine).  Stories by "physician" or "nurse" can also be searched.  The site has over 3000 items at the time of this submission.

An entry includes a summary description of the work as well as a commentary.

 

This article describes an informal course on literature and medicine for medical students. A wide range of books, plays and poems were used with medical and non-medical themes. Students enjoyed the course and particularly welcomed the non-medical components. Several book lists are provided with an emphasis on classic authors (e.g. Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Lewis Carroll, although The Color Purple is also included in one). Description focuses on general structure and students' reactions rather than details of discussions. The author urges informality for this kind of literary discussion and suggests even calling it a "club" rather than a "course." Could be useful to discuss ethics of care or as a starting place for a more diverse reading list.

In this blog post, poet Celeste Lipkes recommends poems she characterizes as "confronting difficult-to-discuss medical diagnoses."  Her list includes a variety of conditions and the poems are written from a variety of perspectives, including health care providers, family members, and patients.  She provides a brief synopsis of each collection, including examples.

She reviews (and provides links to purchase) the following poetry collections:

• Radium Girl by Celeste Lipkes: A physician writes about her experience as a young woman with Crohn’s disease
• Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen: A man writes about his brother’s suicide
• Big–Eyed Afraid by Erica Dawson: A black woman writes about her experiences of bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder
• Blue Sonoma by Jane Munro: A wife writes about the progression of her husband’s Alzheimers
• We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders by Pamela Spiro Wagner: A woman writes about her experience of schizophrenia
• The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle by Tom Andrews: A motocross racer writes about having hemophilia
• Deluge by Leila Chatti addresses medical care for women’s reproductive health, including her treatment for heavy uterine bleeding
• The Tradition by Jericho Brown: A black man writes about, among other things, his HIV diagnosis
• Impossible Bottle by Claudia Emerson: poems published posthumously by a woman who died from cancer
• Still Life by Jay Hopler: poems published posthumously by a man who died from prostate cancer

This is a choose-your-own adventure game that aims to illustrate what having depression is like, specifically for those who have not experienced or have not been diagnosed with depression. The creators stress on the opening page that the game is not representative of everyone’s experience with depression, but is an amalgamation of different or shared experiences from people with depression. Each “level” has a different description of what the character, you, do or can do throughout the day. You then have the opportunity to choose between a few options that lead to different results or storylines. Some of the options are portrayed as beneficial while others are harmful. Some levels, specifically when the character’s depression is particularly extreme, show  answers that are red-lined and unavailable to us, although we can read them. There are many different endings that appear depending on what choices you make throughout the game, meaning that everyone in the class who plays could have a different outcome or experience, which can lead to an opportunity for discussion.

The creators end the game with this message : “Instead of a tidy ending, we want to just provide a series of outlooks to take moving forward. After all, that's all we can really do with depression - just keep moving forward. And at the end of the day it's our outlook, and support from people just like you, that makes all the difference in the world.”

This narrative experience could be used to discuss themes such as immersive and experiential learning, including controversial learning models such as disability simulations It can also be used to discuss what we value in narratives: does the ability to act as the character immerse us more? Do we feel distanced without an author to connect with? The game play could be supplemented with other reading materials to compare and contrast different uses of narrative.  When the game was released, it was also caught up in the “gamer-gate controversy” (described in a New Yorker feature article: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/zoe-quinns-depression-quest).  This larger context for the game could prompt discussion about stigma associated with depression, and the appropriateness of using a “game” to educate in this way.

Users have the option to "play for free" or "pay what you want."

This is an outline for a workshop I led for the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative Community of Practice, May 26, 2020.  Although this workshop occurred on zoom during the pandemic, it could be modified to address other time periods or other kinds of shared experience of loss.  At the time it was offered, we gave the workshop the following description:

This pandemic has produced so many losses—some devastating, others disruptive or disappointing. This workshop will provide a space to name our losses, both large and small, and also to name and articulate what we may be finding. In the spirit of narrative medicine, we will use reading, writing, and listening to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on our own and others’ stories of what we have lost and found.

The audience for the workshop included Health Care Professionals, Patients, Caregivers, Artists, Scholars, and Students (15 to 25 people) and no previous preparation was expected of them. The outline provides time-markers for a 90-minute session.

The Accessible Narrative Medicine digital library includes outlines for narrative medicine workshops, as well as "third objects" (poems, short essays, stories, images, items that can be the catalyst for conversation, reflection, and writing).

The goal of the site is to encourage the practice of narrative medicine in a wide range of community settings by making available detailed workshop outlines and resources that can be adapted by community workshop facilitators for their particular audience and setting.  The developers of the site believe that "narrative medicine workshops should be led by trusted members of a community. In order to create an inclusive safe space, the content and leadership of a workshop should reflect the lived experience of those attending."  The outlines and materials focus on the health narratives of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and persons living with disability.

Registration is required to access the materials; once registered, site users can find workshops on core narrative medicine ideals, including attention, witness, and re-presentation.  The library of third objects is searchable by topic and genre and includes not only written works but also images and art. The site has secured permission for use of narratives and many of the third objects include a bio for the author/artist, as well as a downloadable PDF of the object.

The Health Humanities Consortium's Syllabus Repository is a searchable database of syllabi from academic, professional development, and public education programs with a connection to health humanities.  Not all of the syllabi are focused on health narratives, but many are, and many of the syllabi on broader health humanities-related topics include narrative readings, assignments, and other material.  For example, a search for the topic, "narrative," brought up numerous results, including courses on narrative medicine, illness stories, medicine and literature, autobiography, media, writing, social history, and gender and race.

The site is searchable by course topic, discipline, level of course, and modality.  Users are also invited to share their own syllabi.

This is a thorough facilitator’s guide on how to facilitate class discussions on the cross-cultural healthcare documentary Worlds Apart (a detailed summary can be found in the Search for Stories tab).  In brief, Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience, including a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer, a Lao woman with a hole in her heart, a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant, and a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression. This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive. 

The facilitator's guide provides background on the filmmakers and their intentions. It includes suggestions for facilitators such as setting ground rules for discussion and asking students to jot down notes during the documentary. The four-part narrative-driven documentary is summarized, and then each section is broken down in great detail, so even someone who did not watch the film could understand the exact circumstances of each family and individual being featured. After each synopsis we also receive medical background information and a variety of discussion questions specifically tailored to different issues discussed in the stories. Each section has a separate “focus” also outlined, ranging from language barriers to explanatory modules to informed consent to racial/ethnic healthcare disparities to non-adherence to medications. This guide was created “to give health care professionals an engaging experience through which to explore ideas about cross-cultural issues in health care and to learn from the actual experiences of both patients and clinicians,” but could also easily be adapted to a university classroom setting to guide student discussions. The guide does not include any assignments, but any of the issues headlining the discussion topics could work well as research essay prompts.

Podcast series created by physician Emily Silverman that focuses on humanizing medical practice through healthcare workers' storytelling. Some topics: interview with author of a book on forced sterilization, "Black Voices in Healthcare" and "Post-Roe America". Episodes run 35-55 minutes; first 10-15 is story, the rest is wide-ranging interviews about (e.g.) why did you become a doctor? With related interview (see Farrell, 2022) could be used both to discuss storytelling as a way to address burnout, and to introduce oral history interviews.

This is an outline for a class exercise utilizing a video from the Look Now Project. The short documentary tells Ajnu's story of treatment for breast cancer.

The class exercise is part of a one-hour session entitled "Between the Lines,"  part of a training by the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative in collaboration with Lewis & Clark College, which brought together undergraduate students, medical students, and medical professionals for a one-day workshop.  In the "Between the Lines" session, we examined how clinical interactions are framed by medical scripts and encourage changing these frames to make room for patient stories. Then we engage in practicing listening closely to patient stories for what is said, how it is said, what is not said, and how our own experiences and identities shape what we hear.

An online collection of graphic medicine texts and teaching resources for introducing graphic medicine to different audiences: high school grades 7-10, undergraduates. Features a well-designed module "Comics for health and medicine," organized as an introduction to graphic medicine for undergraduates. The module offers outlines for 7 class sessions, links to suggested readings (graphic texts as well as reference material such as PubMed), discussion questions, activities and assignments, adapted from a Penn State College of Medicine course offered to fourth year medical students. Also offers a lesson plan for grades 7-10.

"Writing stories can create better doctors." Baruch is convinced that narrative medicine - focusing on close reading - isn't enough to prepare physicians to deal with ambiguities, confusions and conflicts inherent in medical practice. He urges teaching them to write stories so they can hear their patients' stories better. References and describes courses he has taught (one with an MFA creative writer) to teach medical students about characters, conflict, selecting key details ... storytelling elements often emphasized in creative writing. The goal is to encourage them to struggle with words on the screen (or page) to prepare to more deeply understand the fragmented, often confusing stories presented by patients. Good preparation for a teacher contemplating a narrative assignment; maybe less so for the students themselves.

Concise summary of the history of medical humanities and how a distinct understanding of health humanities (using disability studies as an example, emphasizing how much of living with disabilities does not happen in medical contexts) contributes to analyzing and understanding human factors in health. Useful as background for undergraduate courses; expanding conversation for pre-health and health professional students.

2 page (total) text presented here is a health narrative presented as a Twitter thread that raises issues that could be connected to several themes in courses related to health communication, reproductive justice, public health, narrative medicine, or more general writing courses to which the instructor wanted to add a health component. The outline includes detailed instructions for close reading the text, a central form of inquiry in narrative medicine. The goal of this instructional strategy is to can help participants attend closely to the narrative and find a point of personal connection to it. The format of the health narrative - a thread of about 20 tweets - lends itself to analyzing the role or impact of the medium on circulation of the message. Short enough to read aloud in a 45-50 minute class and work from there; could also be used in a workshop or storytelling group centered on prenatal care and/or disability.

This is an outline for a 90 minute undergraduate class on narrative medicine. It draws on readings by Arthur Frank and Rita Charon to talk about the importance of patient stories for patients to make sense of illness and for health care providers to provide care. It also addresses the importance of witnessing stories as a means of addressing power inequalities and health disparities. In addition to excerpts from classic works by Frank and Charon, the class session incorporates essays by a medical student (Ali) and a practicing physician (McMullen) on the significance of stories in their practice. The outline is from a practicum class, and so the class session includes narrative medicine practices of close reading and reflective writing, as well as class discussion of the assigned readings.

This 3000-level course is of particular interest to Spanish majors and minors with health professions interests, although readings and assignments are aimed at any Spanish student with intermediate level proficiency. Creative writing majors from English, students interested in editing and publishing, International Studies and Global Health Studies majors, Communication Studies majors with general interests in health, all have succeeded. Readings are from Latinx and Latin American authors; some in English, many in Spanish. Assignments are four creative writing projects, one that becomes a digital video.

The "About" section of this blog explains its purpose as follows: "Reflective MedEd is dedicated to reflective practice in medical education and care of the person. We publish contributions that offer insight and illumination into the experience of educating the next generation of physicians. We welcome the thoughts of educators, patients, and all who foster awareness of the human dimension of doctoring and develop advocates for the just and equitable treatment of all patients." Especially welcome are submissions that address "social justice and a concern for marginalized and vulnerable populations, the role of faith in medical practice, and ethical standards of decision making." Reflective MedEd is supported by the Ralph P. Leischner, Jr., MD, Department of Medical Education at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

Blog posts include both personal narratives and reflective essays from a variety of experiences and perspectives. For example: "How COVID Impacted my First Patient and Patient Death Experience," "What I have Learned About Trust from Black Women," and "The Wolf: How skeptical should we be of our patients?"

The online publication Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine provides this brief set of instructions for writing haiku. The Pulse site also includes many examples of haiku. These instructions (and examples from the site) could be used in a variety of settings. For example, the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative teaches a session on writing haiku as part of it's narrative scribe training, a workshop dedicated to developing the skills of listening closely to a story, and then offering it back to the teller.  Just as medical record keeping often distills a detailed patient narrative into the forms required for diagnosis and health record keeping, so too haiku can be used to distill a narrative into a gist.  The contrast between what details might make it into an electronic health record and what details a haiku might focus upon can prompt discussion of what is left out of many clinical interactions.

Writing haiku can also be a useful exercise in college courses.  It is an accessible form of poetry to teach as one example and can prompt discussion of what constitutes a narrative.

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.