Image Credit: “person-talking-a-walk-in-nature-carrying-a-typewriter-overcoming-writers-block_ai,” generated by the Author with Davinci AI. In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical…
Category: Theory and Practice
The Chaos Narratives of Undiagnosed Illness
Image: “L’appel du Vide,” by Danielle Wilfand (oil painting). It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, piecing together how best to boil down my…
Measuring Humanity in Medicine, One Multiple-choice Question at a Time
The day after the U.S. presidential election, I sat for my hospice and palliative medicine board exam along with a colleague, one of my partners. During one long day, we worked our way through 240 questions over a 10-hour timeframe. During a break, my partner observed: “It’s unsatisfying to test our skills in multiple-choice format.”…
The Patient’s Productive Imagination: The Reportability Paradox in Narratives of Contested Illnesses
Contested or invisible illnesses, such as some autoimmune diseases, multi-chemical sensitivity, and chronic Lyme disease, are characterized by the difficulty in identifying biological markers of pathology. These illnesses manifest in symptoms (i.e., subjective, embodied sensations) rather than objective, pathophysiological signs, making them difficult to quantify and verify objectively, according to the expectations of biomedicine (Malterud…
In the Chair, On the Couch: Haircuts and Mental Health
It’s sort of hard to remain current with haircuts as a resident. I usually like to go every six weeks or so to keep my coif from becoming too sheep-dog for clinical medicine. But sometimes, I push it a little longer, with the justification that, “Well, if mustaches are in, so too must other trends…
Black Feminist Healing Arts: A Making of Pedagogy and Praxis
BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS . . . – the inception – It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global…
The Illuminating Power of Things
I work in a museum that is devoted to the history of healthcare (yes, healthcare, a word deliberately chosen over medicine). As the curator, much of my work is behind the scenes, but I spend a significant chunk of my time interacting with the public and giving tours. It’s a part of the job I…
Don’t Forget: Notes Toward Totalities
Five times a day, my watch informs me I am going to die. This isn’t the beginning of a thriller—no stalking by some sinister, sentient AI. It’s an experiment with WeCroak, the app purportedly “inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.” Dutifully, WeCroak…
Chiasm: How Seeing and Hearing Speaks of a Planet in Crisis
Source: (Mortillaro) During the worldwide COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, the media disseminated satellite images of disappearing clouds of pollution over countries like China and Italy. The accompanying copy drew on words like “surreal,” “striking” (Mortillaro), as well as “unprecedented” (Hickey). The headlines sensationalized the images. Online media posts implied a connection between the lack of…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…