The co-editors of Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics, Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann, open their introduction with their goal for this text to “reposition narrative medicine with trauma studies and ethics in a global context” (xv). The book contains 20 chapters from scholars of medicine/healthcare, narrative medicine, trauma-informed care, ethics, literature/writing, philosophy, anthropology, arts…
Tag: ethics
Admiring the Other: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part Two
In the summer of 2022, I attended the VariAbilities conference hosted by The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida. As a part of the program, presenters were invited to tour the museum’s extensive circus and print archive. Among these artifacts were a small collection of photo albums that featured both named and unnamed performers of…
Ulysses Contracts and the “Authentic Self”
“‘In flowery meads the sportive Sirens play, Touch the soft lyre, and tune the vocal lay; Me, me alone, with fetters firmly bound, The gods allow to hear the dangerous sound. Hear and obey; if freedom I demand, Be every fetter strain’d, be added band to band.’” In the above, Odysseus addresses his crew as…
Please open with a vivid and compelling short story of a patient encounter
The textbooks that I used as a medical student in the 1990s were illustrated with photographs of real patients. I can vividly recall the images of three depicted patients, stripped naked, standing with their palms facing upwards, posed with their hands by their sides and feet shoulder width apart like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man….
On therapeutic nihilism
What we do is less about being right — though surely, that matters — and more about doing right by others, accompanying them in their journeys, marshaling the resources (cognitive, emotional, material) we have available to us to do so.
The Tiger in the Waiting Room–Addressing Moral Stress in Medicine
Jane Desmond, Ph.D. // Is our medical training, medical practice, and our research in the health humanities adequately recognizing and responding to moral stress? Are some populations, specialties, or jobs within healthcare more likely to experience it? [How] can we imagine future systems of care that alleviate this type of stress among practitioners?