Type of Course: Undergraduate

Narrative Medicine activity using Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

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.

Books to pair with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal

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.

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.

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.

How to Find Health Narratives: TikTok

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

Bibliography: Patient-provider communication stories

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.

“Final del juego” por Julio Cortázar

The story revolves around a young narrator, her sisters Holanda and Leticia, their mother, and their aunt Ruth. Leticia suffers from an unidentified back ailment and often directs their play. Told from the point of view of a child learning to understand disability, with emotions ranging from pity to envy: Leticia is excused from chores and catches the eye of an appealing stranger. Could begin discussion of how people with disabilities are perceived and responded to by able-bodied peers and family members, portrayals of relationships. 8 pps (4500 words); Argentinian dialect; some very funny moments.

Para vivir con salud: Leyendo la salud y la literatura.

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.

“Rosario Tijeras” Jorge Franco

"Rosario Tijeras" by Jorge Franco is a Colombian novel that explores the world of drug trafficking and its impact on individuals. The story follows Rosario as she grapples with the trauma of sexual abuse, which has driven her into a life of crime within the violent drug trade. The novel also delves into Rosario's mental health and the relationships she forms. Additionally, it sheds light on the effects of child sexual abuse and the physical toll of her criminal lifestyle as they lead to hospitalization. Undergraduates would be highly motivated by the storyline, dialect and characters. 160 pages, only available in print or electronic (paid) edition, but inexpensive ($10 used) and readily available.