Medical Humanities Commons^™

Afterword And After The Ward: The Poetry Cure, Abriana Jette, Margarita Sverdlova

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

What impact might poetry have on an individual's psychosomatic system? This piece connects current research in occupational therapy with the acts of writing, listening, and reading poetry.

And Yet, Angelina Hong

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

As healthcare workers, invested in the wellbeing of our patients while also hoping to grow as individuals, we sometimes tend to view our jobs as a rigid duality—we are either “in love” with our practice and persevere flawlessly through all hardship, or we are “burnt out,” coldhearted, and defeated by the heavy workload and expectations of medicine.

In reality, we all sit somewhere in the middle of a blurry spectrum, balancing out physical, mental, and emotional pain with the immense honor of saving and cherishing human life, while simultaneously struggling to reconcile our altruistic goals with realistic but necessary human …

Ambivalence At 10 000 Feet, Marc Perlman

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

The transition from medical neophyte to seasoned physician is a gradual process spanning the course of many years. However, there are various milestones throughout the experience that capture increases in decision-making capacity and responsibility, such as the switch from pre-clinical to clinical medical education. Medical students in their clinical years are endowed with an abundance of knowledge from their pre-clinical years and are just beginning to synthesize and apply that information to patient care. “Ambivalence at 10 000 Feet” captures a reflection of a third-year medical student on the theoretical decision to provide emergency medical care in the absence of …

My Heart, Mina Bhatnagar

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

A poem expressing a daughter’s love for her father through their shared passions for cardiology and medicine.

Search History Of A Medical Student, Brian R. Smith

Journal of Wellness

No abstract provided.

A Matter Of Perspective, Andrew M. Joseph

be Still

"A Matter of Perspective" is a poem that attempts to rationalize from where the power of conflict is derived. Additionally, it offers a possible perspective about conflict that may be perceived as counterintuitive.

A Call To Create: Poetry As Healing And One Nurse’S Self-Discovery, Kim Cornett Henry, Kim Cornett Henry

English Theses

Florence Nightingale’s vision for nursing has changed greatly in the past one hundred and fifty years, with nursing’s identity replaced with an emphasis on science over caring. The fast-paced, technologically sophisticated environments, designed to meet the declining health of an American public, have resulted in nurses who are being pulled away from nurse-to-patient caring acts and the reasons they felt called to become nurses. These changes have had detrimental psychological and emotional effects on nurses and are especially evident in Intensive Care nurses. Expressive writing as poetry, autoethnography, and participation in vibrant writing communities offer nurses experiences for healing, voice, …

The Current, Scott K. Heysell

Journal of Wellness

No abstract provided.

Still Learning: Covid Through The Eyes Of A Medical Student, Alexis Strahan

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

As a first-year medical student when the COVID-19 pandemic found a foothold, I felt an overwhelming amount of emotions that accompanied the pandemic’s spread. Fear, although a reasonable choice, was not the first emotion that I experienced. In fact, it was a general feeling of paralysis. I had not six months prior taken an oath to commit my career and life to the service of the public’s health care needs, yet I could provide little more than the textbook knowledge of biochemistry or genetics from my first semester of learning. My hands felt unarmed and unskilled for the fight. What …

Excerpt From: {Being About To Ascend}, Steven B. Katz

Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine

This poem constitutes a different take on the theme of this special issue of Survive and Thrive—“Diversity and Community in Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities.” An excerpt from a longer poem under development, the poem here is a story of human frailty and limitation at the end of Anthropocene, the end of the age of humans on Earth—perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant future. This poem is thus a “speculative” or “science fiction” story about what happens to a species indigenous and totally adapted to and dependent on the Earth, and which cannot survive anywhere else, must. Facing extinction, the …

Editors’ Note To Vol 5: Issue 1: On Publishing Survive And Thrive: Journal Of Medical Humanities And Narrative Medicine During The 2020 Global Pandemic, Steven B. Katz, Suzanne Black

Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine

This Editors' Note reflects the thoughts and feelings of the Editors of _Survive and Thrive_ on Vol 5: Issue 1, summarizes its contents, and reflects on the publication of the issue during a global pandemic. While the issue is not a direct response to the pandemic, the Editors humbly offer it as what writer, rhetorician, and literary critic Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living."

Consented End, Rabia Mazhar

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

This poem is a reflection upon my personal experience of taking care of a young patient with post-partum sepsis and multi-organ failure following the delivery of her second child. She was able to spend one night at home with her family before suddenly decompensating and becoming encephalopathic. In her last moments awake, she relayed to the EMS her wishes of being placed in hospice. The poem narrates her spouse’s internal struggle after respecting the patient’s wishes of withdrawal of care.

Anatomic By Adam Dickinson, Heather Houser

The Goose

Review of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic.

A Tributary, To Poetry And Its Teachers, Avesa I. Rockwell

Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine

This personal essay accompanies a reprint of Jimmy Santiago Baca's poem "What's Real and What's Not." It pays tribute to the secondary English teacher who introduced the author to Baca, and to Baca himself, who made several notable appearances in her life.

Thank you, David Beard, for your encouragement and guidance.

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Unbroken, Masood Mohammed

be Still

Unbroken is a short, powerful poem describing some of the all too familiar difficulties that students and physicians face in the hospital and medical field as a whole.

Beginnings, Nehal J. Shah

Akesis

The beginning of one thing signifies the end of another – for one to start, another must end. With that said, under karmic and Hindu belief, we are constantly in a cycle of beginnings, and endings, until we achieve “moksha” – true oneness with God. Furthermore, within each cycle, there are four stages of life that one hopes to go through, carrying out the ideal goals and progress of each existence. Therefore, this life ultimately is a new beginning to an old soul – a soul that has traveled and journeyed upon eons of time to find happiness, spirituality, completeness …