I. A psychiatrist from NewYork–Presbyterian visited my seminar on depression and shared a case study. His subject: a politically astute college student, recently undone by the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The student, anxious but articulate, declined a formal diagnosis. If you knew as much as I do, he told the psychiatrist, you’d be depressed too….
Category: Theory and Practice
Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative’s Effort in a Medical School
The ethical life is not first about decision-making but about discernment. It is concerned with the long and often painful work of coming to understand oneself within a world of obligations, histories, and relationships (Williams 308). This understanding of ethics was an animating conviction behind the Columbia Character Cooperatives—a professional and moral formation initiative for…
Refusing to Tell the Polite Lie: Lessons on Courageous Veracity from Ivan Ilyich’s Ethicist
In Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the lesser-known and often underappreciated character of Gerasim—a young, poor, uneducated peasant with the unenviable task of emptying Ivan’s chamber pot—serves as a subtle but powerful reminder of the moral imperative to be courageously veracious with those who wrestle with questions of meaning and…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
Accounts of Estrangement: About Filaments and other Metaphors
In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
The Horror of Noncompliance: Instructional Language and Unruly Bodies in “The Substance” (2024)
Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives
Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking
Image Credit: Photograph of fungal mycelium by Rob Hille, used under Creative Commons licence. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope––or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin. The Art of Noticing, Anna Tsing Crip theory has often sought out conceptual frameworks that…
Take a Hike, or Better Yet, a Walk: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
Image Credit: “person-talking-a-walk-in-nature-carrying-a-typewriter-overcoming-writers-block_ai,” generated by the Author with Davinci AI. In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical…
The Chaos Narratives of Undiagnosed Illness
Image: “L’appel du Vide,” by Danielle Wilfand (oil painting). It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, piecing together how best to boil down my…