As medical schools began offering courses in the arts, humanities and creative writing as a way to increase students’ awareness of the “softer side” of caregiving, nursing programs hurried ever farther away from touch and ever closer to technology.
Category: A Different Take
Remember The Nurses
Commentary by Thomas Lawrence Long, Associate Professor-in-Residence, School of Nursing, University of Connecticut Name three popular physician writers working today. Atul Gawande. Pauline Chen. Oliver Sacks. Jill Bolte Taylor. Jerome Groopman. Rafael Campo. Deepak Chopra. Edward de Bono. Andrew Weil. >> Read more
Rescuing Sympathy
Commentary by Jack Coulehan, M.D. M.P.H., Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine and Fellow, Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, New York Many authors who write about empathy in medicine are careful to draw a bright line between >> Read more
Disease Causality
Commentary by Daniel Goldberg, J.D., Ph.D. Health Policy & Ethics Fellow, Chronic Disease Prevention & Control Research Center, Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine; Research Faculty, Initiative on Neuroscience & Law, Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine There >> Read more
Is Medical Uncertainty Necessary?
Commentary by Caroline Wellbery, M.D., Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center; Associate Deputy Editor, American Family Physician Medical uncertainty is all around us In medicine we are quite often confronted with ‘not knowing,’ with ‘choices,’ with ‘multifactorial >> Read more
Summer Blogging: Traveller's Joy
We are taking a break from our regular essay commentaries until September. In the meantime, there will be occasional short postings, mostly by me (Felice Aull). This image of the plant, Traveller’s Joy, invokes this summer interlude — the pleasure >> Read more
The Family Portrait Project
Commentary by Mary Spano, Medical Photographer, The Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery, NYU Langone Medical Center. Spano’s work is on exhibit from June 29-August 31 in the Smilow Gallery at NYU School of Medicine. Free and open to the public. >> Read more
Of Current Interest
While we are working on the next blog commentary, check out a Lancet article by Jane Macnaughton, “The Dangerous Practice of Empathy,” a perspective on the art of medicine. Macnaughton argues that “true empathy derives from an experience of intersubjectivity >> Read more
Let The Living Teach Physicians About Healing
Commentary by Felice Aull, Ph.D., M.A.; Adjunct Associate Curator, New York University School of Medicine; Editor in Chief, Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times (“Dead Body of Knowledge”) Christine Montross made >> Read more
The Mirror and Self-Knowledge
Commentary by David Biro, MD, PhD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Dermatology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and author of One Hundred Days: My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient. His new book, The Language of Pain, will be published by >> Read more