Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Manual Of Disaster: Creativity, Preparedness, And Writing The Emergency Room, Andrea Charise, Stefan Krecsy

Creative Humanities Special Issues

This essay offers a critical examination of creativity discourse at the intersection of two disciplinary fields: health and humanities. In contrast to creativity’s longstanding associations with making, imitation, or invention, we examine the relatively recent emergence of what we call creativity’s preparatory capacity, particularly within critical discussions of healthcare and illness narratives. Working with fictional representations of the emergency room in physician-writer Jay Baruch’s short story collection Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (2007), we identify how particular narrative techniques are revealed in a range of emergency scenarios—both within and beyond the fictional setting—and what such deployments of creativity …