Children are everywhere in the conversation about water insecurity. They appear in statistics, policy briefs, and photographs meant to evoke a sense of urgency. We are constantly reminded that hundreds of children die each day from water-related disease (UNICEF, 2026), and that safe water is foundational to their health, education, and futures (Rhue et al….
Category: Theory and Practice
From Interval to Image: Carson, Mann, and the Art of Clinical Reasoning
In attempting to explain how physicians in my field of geriatric medicine think through clinical cases, I have come to realize over the course of my training that, although the prevailing schemas of clinical reasoning are often presented as algorithmic, the interval between observation and a formal diagnosis feels less like a straightforward thought process…
Psychiatry’s Political Responsibility
I. A psychiatrist from NewYork–Presbyterian visited my seminar on depression and shared a case study. His subject: a politically astute college student, recently undone by the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The student, anxious but articulate, declined a formal diagnosis. If you knew as much as I do, he told the psychiatrist, you’d be depressed too….
Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative’s Effort in a Medical School
The ethical life is not first about decision-making but about discernment. It is concerned with the long and often painful work of coming to understand oneself within a world of obligations, histories, and relationships (Williams 308). This understanding of ethics was an animating conviction behind the Columbia Character Cooperatives—a professional and moral formation initiative for…
Refusing to Tell the Polite Lie: Lessons on Courageous Veracity from Ivan Ilyich’s Ethicist
In Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the lesser-known and often underappreciated character of Gerasim—a young, poor, uneducated peasant with the unenviable task of emptying Ivan’s chamber pot—serves as a subtle but powerful reminder of the moral imperative to be courageously veracious with those who wrestle with questions of meaning and…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
Accounts of Estrangement: About Filaments and other Metaphors
In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
The Horror of Noncompliance: Instructional Language and Unruly Bodies in “The Substance” (2024)
Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives
Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking
Image Credit: Photograph of fungal mycelium by Rob Hille, used under Creative Commons licence. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope––or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin. The Art of Noticing, Anna Tsing Crip theory has often sought out conceptual frameworks that…