The Lessons of Natural Forms: How anatomy in nature can reveal much about our own by neurosurgery resident Angela Tang-Tan

Today I’m learning
a new lesson —how

plants can look just
like organs, the part

of our bodies we know
and don’t know

So begins the poem “Anatomy in Nature” (Spring 2018 Intima) by writer Jesse Holth. In her stunning poem, the writer draws parallels between human organs and the surprising ways in which these forms are repeated in ecology:

How frond and fern
can be phalanges, just as
reaching, branching out.

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From Doing to Feeling: A reflection about difficult moments by resident physician Kirsten Myers

Poems make sense of the world. Both the poem “Not Compatible with Life” (Spring-Summer 2025 Intima) by writer Caroline Slater and my poem “I Closed His Eyes” (Spring-Summer 2026 Intima) illustrate the experience of being a healthcare professional in a difficult moment. There is almost a disassociation that occurs in the moment for me, and perhaps for Slater as well.

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Seeing and Being Seen in a Clinical Encounter by psychiatric nurse practitioner Sarah Cady

When I first read Joseph Zarconi's poem American Sonnet for an Addict, I thought it was asking many of the same questions that concerned me while writing my essay Re: Interesting Case. Both seemed interested in the uneasy space between a person's experience and the clinical language used to describe it. But I kept returning to the way the poem begins: "The doctor drags his learning flock into my room."

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What We Hear at the Dinner Table: A reflection by poet Jamie L. Smith about immigrant parents, their children, mental health and conversations we rarely have

Ellen Chang’s animated short, The Dinner Table (Spring 2026 Intima), beautifully illustrates intergenerational mistranslation, and the difficulty of bridging the divide between first-generation immigrants and their children when it comes to discussions of mental health. As the animation moves between Korean and English, what the daughter intends versus what the father hears, and what the father communicates versus what he means, the dining table at the center of the short lengthens and contracts, the distance between them widening and narrowing as they grapple for understanding.

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I Want to Hold Your Hand: A reflection on barriers, well-being and gestures of care by writer Rosa Singer

If the objective is to minimize suffering, yours and mine, as patient and healthcare professional, how do we gesture to each other around the barriers of an imperfect system? Is there any gesture of care too small?

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A Reflection on Fathers and Daughters by Dixie L. King

In the essay “My Father’s Doctor” (Spring 2016 Intima), Pennsylvania pediatrician Jennifer Chianese purports to write about her father’s relationship with his female doctor and the ways in which that relationship is both rooted in and transcends the traditional roles for women that is his cultural heritage. Her father sees future opportunity for his own daughters in this doctor who would later make headlines by killing her elderly parents. But the secondary story is that of Chianese’s relationship with her father, who became terminally ill when she was just 10 years old, and how she processed through his impending loss. The doctor tells her, “This is a difficult time for your parents. You need to be on your best behavior.”

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Voices That Remain: A dialogue about mentors, memory and what matters

Some voices outlast the people who spoke them. In his Crossroads blog, “The Voice that Lingers,” (June 19, 2026 Intima) Kenneth Iserson, a professor emeritus of emergency medicine, tells it as a physician: the dead mentor keeps speaking in a student's stethoscope, in a resident's patience at two in the morning, even in the margin of a machine's report that has learned to wait before it concludes. The voice refuses to be deleted — not because anyone saved it, but because it had gone in too deep, beneath the skin, beneath the name, where not even death goes looking.

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The Body Holds It All: Love, Labor, and the Weight of Care  by Mildred Galvez

With the same hands that now hold and annotate my textbooks, I once read and reread my mother’s biopsy results. With those same hands, I helped her rise from her chair when the chemotherapy was too strong, and with those same hands, I now care for my patients. 

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When the Script Is Not Enough: A reflection about clinical interviews by medical student Macie Garner

In physician Chloe Nazra Lee’s essay “’I Love You’ in Cantonese,” a psychiatry trainee worries she has failed at interviewing. Instead of correcting her technique, her attending offers unexpected advice: Stop worrying about the checklist and just talk to the patient. Clinical interviews, he suggests, are not only about completion but about making room for connection. In that space, conversation itself can become therapeutic, not only for the patient but also for the clinician.

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On “The Difficult Patient” and the efforts to mediate ER doctors’ hearts by nocturnist Thomas Robey

Neurologist Kendra Peterson explored reactions to “The Difficult Patient” in her poem (Fall 2017 Intima) nearly a decade ago. Long before chart cloning and copy forward worked their way into the documentation of the clinical relationship between patient and physician via the keystrokes and dot phrases of the electronic medical record, caregivers have developed shortcuts of stereotyping and rapid assessment that make their lives easier.  Clinical gestalt is often celebrated, while bias is treated as something separate from it.  And is the label “difficult” any different than the convenience of using yesterday’s assessment as the foundation for today’s decisions?  Is propagation of a name or a label such as ‘difficult patient’ a type of plagiarism? 

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What the Midwife Knew and I Learned by physician Guilherme Coelho

Nancy Glass’s Field Notes essay “What Did La Abuela See?” (Fall 2019 Intima) put me back inside a room I had stood in once, half a hemisphere away, on a wooden floor that smelled of cedar and boiled water.

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The Voice that Lingers: On role models, inheritance, and the impact that outlives us: A reflection by emergency medicine pioneer Kenneth Iserson

No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician. He simply was the reason, the best person in his son’s entire world, and the choice followed as naturally as breathing. The acts of the forefathers, an ancient maxim holds, are symbolic for their children. Identity is inherited before it is chosen.

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The Evolution of Anecdote to Story and Beyond by Angus Woodward

My father was a raconteur, and as his dementia advanced, he often got caught in anecdotal loops. In the middle of a familiar story, he would forget that he had told the beginning, repeat it, then charge through the middle before backtracking again, cycling through the tale until some kind of interruption saved him and his listeners.

Reading Samantha Stewart’s poem “Stingray” (Spring 2022 Intima) made me think about how experiences can become anecdotes, which may turn into stories, which may evolve into legends. And I saw how personal legends connect the dying to the living.

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