In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
Tag: medical education
Book Review: Narrative Medicine: Trauma & Ethics by Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann
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…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part III): The “Tokyo Project”
What was the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Tokyo Project”?
“It Sits There, Looking at Me”: Scenes on AI, Star Trek, and Medical Education
Synopsis The author experiences multiple encounters with AI discourse and struggles to make sense of the tension in their body that results. The author makes no argument and finds no answers; the author invites you, Reader, into the mess, where it sits there, looking at us. — Scene 1: At the recent Rhetoric of…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II)
How did American medical professionals design and learn from the 1923 Japanese Medical Commission to the United States for the promotion of “American medicine”?
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part I): “American Medicine” and Its Ambition in East Asia (early 20th century)
How was medical exchange intertwined with diplomacy between Japan and the United States in the early 20th century?
Equitable Representation in Medical Textbooks
Erasure is the act of denying or refusing to acknowledge that people’s race and lived experiences in America differ through socioeconomic, historical, political, and legal factors. This concept of colorblindness, also known as erasure, is counterproductive when it results in the inability to recognize the need to include diverse representation and instead results in the…
Seinfeld, “The Junior Mint,” and How Medical Knowledge Lands in the Public Sphere
Despite its infamy as a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld’s “Junior Mint” (1993) episode is emphatically about medicine—medical knowledge, the medical world, medical “miracles”. More specifically, it centers on how the ‘general population’ receives medical knowledge. Interwoven subplots caricature the routes through which information about the body’s illnesses and healings pass into what we might call…
Coffee with a Colleague: Bioethicist Keisha Ray, PhD
Keisha Ray, PhD, is an Associate Professor of medical humanities and bioethics at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas. She is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Bioethics. Sarah L. Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health…
Let’s teach doctors there are more ways of knowing
Almost three years ago exactly, I published an essay here on Synapsis titled “In Defense of Humoralism.” In it—to briefly summarize—I highlighted how common ways in which patients understand the etiology of their illnesses and formulate folk treatments can often be understood as humoralistic. Consequently, physicians dismiss these ideas as superstition, as they do not…