A Few Pages for a Life: Self-Portrait Through A Health Record Booklet

“It overflows with loose pages: medical prescriptions all mixed up, from my teenage to my adult years, from benign afflictions to serious troubles. All of those scattered fragments compose an anxious being. Rashes, panic attacks, chronic diarrhea. Nothing really changes, nothing really ever gets better. With slight variations, the same medication names come up again and again. 2005, 2013, 2021.”

In and On the Clinic

All of my previous trips to our nearby hospital have been marked by blood and bruises. As an especially clumsy individual, I’m used to squeezing paper towels tightly around gashed fingers or pressing ice compresses to a purpling forehead, blinking with the unfocused eyes of someone definitively concussed. Accompanied by my wonderful partner, I am…

Let’s Play a Game: Imagination in a Narrative Medicine Workshop

Avril Tynan // In 2010, Martha C. Nussbaum published Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, a manifesto on the importance of arts and humanities education for social and political life. The role of critical thinking in global education policies is being undermined, she argues, by an emphasis on rote learning and the promotion…