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…
Author: Katherine Yao
Katherine Yao is a second-year MD/MPH candidate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. She graduated from Yale University in 2023, where she studied English Literature and Biochemistry/Biophysics. Nowadays, Katherine enjoys thinking and writing about aging, caregiving, and spirituality in medicine. She spends her free time outside (ideally in the mountains), hanging with her cat (named Kit), and hosting big potlucks (in a tiny apartment).
A Shelter in the Sea
I have been finding comfort in the oceans recently. A livestream of a reef in Honduras plays constantly on my computer, even when lost in a sea of open tabs. I’ve picked up Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and am enjoying their…