Rooms can confine us or give us a special place to inhabit. Hallways and corridors can lead us where we want to go or lead us astray. Two works in the Fall 2016 Intima, one fiction and one nonfiction, use these physical spaces to represent the emotional struggles that come with severe or mysterious illness.
Read moreHistory Lessons: What Doctors Learn When Doing Patient Histories by Natasha Massoudi
We learn in medical school to take full social, family and physical histories with a new patient. We use checkboxes to run down the list of points in each history. We are taught to be thorough and document each answer.
Being Useful: The Emotional Transformation of A Caregiver. A Commentary on Family and Coming Together by Bekka DePew
We are often powerless in the face of death or illness to do much besides watch; we are forced to recognize “the uselessness of love to give her breath.” This feeling of helplessness we experience, both as physicians and as caretakers, forces us to reevaluate the way we understand ourselves and the purpose behind the role we play as a family member or a healthcare provider.
Read moreOf Humans and Aliens by Andrea Hansell
“Hospitals tend to have an extraterrestrial air. Shiny structures filled with yawning expanses of slick, sterile floors, strange beeping machines, and masked creatures with gloves cutting open sleeping bodies.”
Read moreThe Immeasurable Cost of Infertility: Reflections on Holly Schechter’s "Genealogy" by Katherine Macfarlane
It feels like I’m always talking about infertility these days. Is infertility just more common because women are waiting longer to have children? We wait longer so we have more problems? Not necessarily.
Read moreWhen the Medical Mask Slips: The Contradictions of Care by Vik Reddy
Patients want caregivers to be professional and competent. At the same time, patients expect a level of compassion and empathy from medical professionals. These two impulses can be contradictory.
Read moreDoes A Poem A Day Keep the Doctor Away? Thoughts on Injecting A Dose of Culture in Medical Waiting Rooms by Debbie McCulliss
Scholars have begun encouraging doctors to gain more insight from their patients through narrative writing, especially poetry. According to Dr. Rita Charon, director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and co-editor of Literature and Medicine, “With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care” (as cited in Encke, 2011).
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