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.”

Calories: The measure of nurture

The date was October 28, 1935. The night could have been peaceful and relaxing for 26-year-old Fukuda Katsu living in Tokyo if her husband did not complain about dinner. After quibbling about her cooking of rice, he rebuked Katsu for lack of knowledge: “You are too indifferent about calories.” His words were like a slap…

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…

Double Bind. A Collaborative Piece on Care and Its Mixed Perceptions

Pauline Picot // Being taken care of is serious. Being taken care of is the first thing you experience when you come to life. You surrender to another human being and in doing so, you establish your first human relationship. Being taken care of is belonging to someone; being the object of their care. Being…

Speculative bodies of the present in hormonal fictions

Kathryn Cai Recently, a series of English language novels that foreground the female body reimagine and transform their hormonal traffic from biologies linked with environmental illness to speculative imaginations of diffused, inchoate influence and overt physical and political power. As studies note, the female body’s hormonal complexities render its porous interactions with the environment particularly…

Where are all the female doctors?

  The Glass Ceiling in Health and Medicine In recent years, we have become far more aware of professional inequalities across cultures, ethnicities, and gender identities. Scholars and cultural critics have drawn attention to the gender disparity within the medical and health fields. In 2017, the number of female physicians in the United States hovers…

Metaphors in Medicine

Charlene Kotei Communication is one of humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated technologies. Narrative is an integral part of the day-to-day transmission of ideas between people. In the medical world, technological and scientific advances have likewise made tremendous advances. And yet, the medical field still lacks the key to success: the effective interpretation of narrative. To…

Robin Williams and the Ability to Console with Humor

James Belarde “Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.” -Robin Williams I vividly remember August 11, 2014 for two reasons. For one, it was the day my medical class at Columbia University observed its White Coat Ceremony, officially marking our matriculation. But it was also the day comedian Robin Williams committed…