A Portrait of Care in Motion: Lauren W. Westerfield’s Woman House

Merve Şen

Accompanying her mother for her ECT treatment at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, Lauren W. Westerfield devours Jean Frémon’s Now, Now, Louison over two consecutive nights. Frémon’s book, as he states and Westerfield herself echoes, is a “portrait in motion.” Rather than a crude biography, it is composed as the inner dialogue of the late artist Louise Bourgeois, taking the reader from one memory to another in fragments and walking them through the artist’s life, art, and

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What Good Is Freedom Without Health?

Eric T. Jones

This holiday weekend marked two significant days – Juneteenth and Father’s Day. On the surface, these days are unrelated, but they help us reflect on health inequity in the United States. Juneteenth has created a space to discuss the ongoing battle for social justice, including racialized health disparities. The rates of disease and death that have devastated Black Americans are abnormal. Yet, health inequity has become so commonplace that we appear to have come to accept it as a natural

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Shakti and Immunity in Pandemic India

Purbita Das

There was a time, not long ago in the Spring of 2021, when “immunity” became the topic du jour: spoken at dining tables, whispered over phone calls, forwarded in remedies and rumours. It slipped, almost unnoticed, from the clinic into the intimate grammar of everyday life. Immunity started to organise how one imagined proximity, obligation and care. Looking back now, from the uneasy distance of five years, what lingers is not only the memory of the crisis but also the

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Large, looming clock face shows a time of around 2:15.

A Homage to Crip Creativity: “Hacks” and the Human Condition

Pasquale Toscano

On May 28, 2026, the acclaimed comedy series Hacks (HBO) premiered its final episode. In it, the show’s two leading ladies—veteran comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her younger, more progressive, writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder)—take a final trip to Paris, together. I say final because—beware spoilers—Deborah has just been diagnosed with cancer, has decided to forego treatment for all the obvious reasons, and, instead, is planning to seek medical-aid-in-dying in Switzerland. Ava is, by turns, furious, distraught, pleading, and

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Narrative, Measured

Katherine Yao

Who is healed when a story is told? In 2001, the physician and literary scholar Rita Charon published an essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that medicine required something she called “narrative competence”: “the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” Charon drew on the work of French literary theorist Gérard Genette, whose Narrative Discourse had shown how stories make meaning not through their content alone but through their

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About

Synapsis Journal

Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Our mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, and we see ourselves as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres.

Synapsis has been supported by The Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and the GSAS Fellowships in Academic Administration Program at Columbia University.

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