A few weeks ago, I cared for a young woman who came in to get her IUD checked and screen for sexually transmitted infections. She sat on the exam table, squeezing the vinyl covering between her fingers and palms, crossing her legs at the ankles. Her lashes were long and fake, curled up like a…
Category: Theory and Practice
On Course Revision
Part of the privilege of junior leave is having a crucial opportunity for pause and reflection after the first few years of being on the tenure track. As I witness my fellow colleagues return to the classroom, many with new special topics courses, courses they’ve never taught before, or new versions of bread-and-butter courses they’ve…
“I am your Doctor”: a prelude to power in medicine
In my acclimatization to being a resident, there are a lot of things that have taken some getting used to. The first is claiming a greater responsibility over patient care than one had during medical school: when I sign an order now, it becomes reality—a lab is drawn, an EKG is performed, a consult to…
Coffee with a Colleague: Bioethicist Keisha Ray, PhD
Keisha Ray, PhD, is an Associate Professor of medical humanities and bioethics at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas. She is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Bioethics. Sarah L. Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health…
“Competent and entrustable”: recentering the virtues in medical education evaluation
In just a few weeks, I will officially be an MD. As a resident, I will provide medical care to sick patients while under the supervision of senior physicians who will help hone my skills. It will be an interesting, challenging time in my life, one that gives me a little bit of anxiety, to…
Everyday Disaster Ethics
This week, the WHO announced that it would cease to designate COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern,” affirming its status instead as an “established and ongoing health issue.” There is a distinction between the emergent and the established, the epidemic and the endemic, the disastrous and the everyday. Bioethics often traffics in disaster—in the…
The Welcome Strangeness of René Magritte’s “The Healer”: Teaching Composite Works of Art
“Just because we have birds in us, we don’t have to be cages.” —Dean Young If you’d welcome the risk of your own undoing, meet René Magritte. The strangeness of his work subverted us. But it also sparked a new teaching strategy: that of facilitating medical learners’ encounters with composites, artworks consisting of incongruent elements. We’ve…
On Reimagining Health Humanities and Disability Studies Courses
This fall, I will be on sabbatical for the first time in my career. In many ways, I am overwhelmed by the possibilities afforded to me by this privilege of time and space so unique to academia and one that few other professions have built into the process of promotion. Yet I remain deeply aware…
The Changing Narrative Medicine Workshop: Finding New Uses for and New Ways to Use Narrative Medicine
The Changing Narrative Medicine Workshop: Finding New Uses for and New Ways to Use Narrative Medicine The narrative medicine workshop, as a structure and method, differentiates narrative medicine as an applied discipline within the larger field of the health humanities. In the narrative medicine Master’s programs at Columbia University and the University of Southern…
Medical Sensations – An Opportunity for a Medical Humanities Engagement
Amala Poli // I recently visited the Canadian Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa to explore the Medical Sensations exhibition, curated by David Pantalony and launched in November, 2017. The curation of this exhibition reveals a profound engagement with medical humanities by enabling the visitor to interact with medical culture. Organized around the five senses,…