Sometimes I am surprised by how often I come back to the idea of narrative medicine as I’m reading essays and poems, even for pure enjoyment. The words from the preface to The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine often come flooding back to me: “Narrative medicine began as a rigorous intellectual and clinical discipline…
Author: Renée K. Nicholson
To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief
As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…
Healthcare is Human: Creative Responses to COVID-19 from Martinsburg, West Virginia
(Photo above: Molly Humphries) It’s not a stretch to say that we are all still grappling with COVID. From a biomedical standpoint, though we have ways of staving off and managing the disease, we are still seeing daily deaths in numbers high enough for there to be ongoing concerns. New strains proliferate through countries even…
Pause and Ambiguity: Vermeer’s Woman With a Balance
I could say, “I wanted to see the Vermeers,” but, in truth, I needed to see them. And so, early on a chilly December morning, I passed through rural highways in West Virginia and Maryland until suburbia gave way to our nation’s capitol. Driving in D.C., never my favorite as someone now used to…
Fractured: Form and Function in Narrative Nonfiction about Illness
When you put the search term, “medical memoir” in a Google search, you find an odd collection of “best of” lists: the ten best for pre-meds, twelve memorable, the list every aspiring physician should read, must-read memoirs about health written by women. Perhaps nothing solidifies a sub-genre quite like these lists. But as someone who…
Disfigured: The Relationship Between Craft and Content in Illness Memoir
The welt under the eyelid appeared today as it did on Friday, and on Tuesday. The week before and the week before that, going back not months but years. Officially diagnosed as idiopathic angioedema, the swelling happens in either eye, and in my lips, changing the whole look of my face into something not quite…