In just a few weeks, I will officially be an MD. As a resident, I will provide medical care to sick patients, while supervised by senior physicians who will help hone my skills. It will be an interesting, challenging time in my life. It is one that gives me a little bit of anxiety,…
Category: Theory and Practice
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,…
The Ethnographer’s Dilemma [Part 2]: “the field”
“Our medium, our canvas, is “the field,” a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere).” (Scheper-Hughes xii) For ethnographers, “the field” is an environment where we spend countless hours participating in and observing…
Let’s teach doctors there are more ways of knowing
Almost three years ago exactly, I published an essay here on Synapsis titled “In Defense of Humoralism.” In it—to briefly summarize—I highlighted how common ways in which patients understand the etiology of their illnesses and formulate folk treatments can often be understood as humoralistic. Consequently, physicians dismiss these ideas as superstition, as they do not…
A Different Gaze
Foucault was a French philosopher known for his interrogation of knowledge and structures of power. In Birth of the Clinic (1973) he described how the medical gaze arose from 18th-century dissection, which exposed ‘what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible’ developing further through 19th-century pathological anatomy, which reduced…
Suspicious Findings
One summer morning, I found myself in the hollow tube of an MRI. A technician pressed foam earplugs into my ears, gingerly placing oversized headphones on top. The hospital’s artificial breeze rustled my gown. Into the imaging machine I went: face down, breasts out. As contrast dye entered my veins, I tasted metal. A symphony…