Type of Submission: Teaching Material

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.

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.

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.

LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

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.

List of resources on Grief

In February 2024, the following request was posted to the Health Humanities listserv: "I'm in the process of compiling a reading list for people (of all ages) who are grieving /working through loss. I'd like to include: poetry anthologies, graphic or traditional memoirs, novels/short story collections, children's picture books/youth fiction, and story-based films." The request came from Allan Peterkin at the University of Toronto, who is compiling a list. Not surprisingly, recommendations also included works on death and dying. The attached document provides a list I compiled from this thread of the listserv.

Literature and medicine: A short course for medical students

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.

Bibliography of poetry collections

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

Depression Quest

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."