Richard Selzer and Ten Terrific Tales by Tony Miksanek, MD Family Physician and Author, Raining Stethoscopes If there were a Medical Humanities Hall of Fame, physician-writer Richard Selzer (1928-2016) would be a first-ballot selection. And likely by a unanimous vote. >> Read more
Category: Medical-literary Hybrids
The Patient Experience Book Club at NYU Langone Medical Center
When an AP reporter called to tell Erika Goldman, publisher of the Bellevue Literary Press, that its novel, Tinkers, by Paul Harding, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “it was akin to receiving a blow to the head,” she >> Read more
Rediscovering a history of trauma: An interview with Dr. Annita Sawyer
Dr. Annita Sawyer is a psychologist and the author of several essays, stories, and a memoir titled Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass, which was published in May 2015. In 1960, however, Dr. Sawyer was battling mental illness and thoughts of suicide. >> Read more
Reading the Body: Live!
Stacy Bodziak, Managing Editor, Bellevue Literary Review Not many literary evenings are divided into sections on “Dissection,” “Bone,” “Brain,” “HEENT,” and “Heart,” but then again, it’s not often that the readings are selected to complement Frank Netter’s iconic illustrations. This >> Read more
Humanity Out of Context: Tinkers as a Touchstone for Dissection
Editor’s Note: I met Rachel Hammer, a third year medical student and MFA candidate at the Mayo Clinic, last month at the American Society of Bioethics and Humanism conference in Minneapolis where she presented a poster about a student poetry >> Read more
Nurse-Poet-Writer Cortney Davis Responds To Thomas Long's Blog On Nurse Writers
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.
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
Seven Reasons Why Doctors Write
Commentary by Tony Miksanek, M.D., family physician, short-story author, and coeditor, Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database As a profession, physicians are a remarkable group of writers. What doctors lack in good penmanship is more than compensated for by their skill >> Read more
The Seven Doctors Project: Creative Writing As Inspiration And Intervention
Commentary by Steve Langan, author of a collection of poems, Freezing (New Issues Press, 2001) and a chapbook, Notes on Exile and Other Poems (Backwaters, 2005); executive director of ALS in the Heartland in Omaha, Nebraska; teaches in the University >> Read more
The Story Always Comes First
Commentary by Jay Baruch, author of Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press, 2007). Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director, Ethics Curriculum, at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University Question: What do you >> Read more