As I was creating Hal Winters, the character at the center of my short story, “Old Scrubs,” (Spring 2024 Intima) I imagined a rumpled, gray-haired, and unflappable older male surgeon who has seen it all. He heads to the hospital every day, goes through the motions and gets his work done without fanfare or fireworks. He hasn’t felt the spark of “why” he went into medicine for years but, as long as he remembers the “how,” he will keep plowing the same furrow.
Read moreLeaning Close: "No more interventions. No more transfusions." A reflection on mortality and morbidity rounds by pediatrician-writer Laura Johnsrude
When I read “All Tuned Up” by Albert Howard Carter III (Spring 2021 Intima), I remembered a pediatric intensive care unit patient from my own 1980’s residency experience. In Carter’s poem, a medical resident presents a case during mortality and morbidity rounds. The resident is moved to tears as he tells the gathered audience about the death of a patient he knew well. A senior doctor “gently” offers context and says, “Maybe he was just tired.”
Mercifully, I’ve muffled memories from some of the deaths during my residency training in the pediatric intensive care unit. But I remember a slight girl of about sixteen with silky, wavy hair, lying in a metal-frame bed parallel to the wall against the window, in silhouette.
Read moreScripting Death: When Words Fail – In Conversation with Liana Meffert’s “Death is Usually an Easy Diagnosis” by Paula Holmes-Rodman
In reading Liana Meffert’s “Death is Usually an Easy Diagnosis,” I was intrigued by her reflections on the learning and limitation of choreographed roles and scripted dialogue in pronouncing death and informing bereaved families.
Read moreLet Me Speak My Free Mind into You: Seeking Genuine Connection in Medical Practice
A medical student examines two poems published in this journal in order to advocate for genuine connection in medical practice between patients and physicians.
Read moreHow Poetry Changed My Practice
A neurologist meditates on his “medical metamorphosis” into a physician—and how poetry served as a lifeline for inspiration and growth throughout it all.
Read moreTaking Him Apart Took Me Apart, Too: On medical school and anatomy class by Chrissie DyBuncio
A former physician reflects on the rite of passage undergone by all medical students: cadaver dissections in anatomy lab.
Read moreDesensitization to the Face of Death: A reflection by poet and medical student Catherine Read
A medical student examines the desensitization that imbues the study and practice of medicine—and advocates against it.
Read moreThe Luxury of Walking Away: An MS4 meditates on time, isolation and the comforts of home
A medical student contemplates her roles as a physician-in-training and learns to appreciate the privilege she possesses—unlike her patients—in walking away from the clinical space.
Read moreSavoring Sunset: A reflection on saying goodbye by physician assistant Sara Lynne Wright
A physician assistant ruminates about the cycle of life, of sunrise and sunset—and how we can better appreciate each waking moment.
Read moreCuring Bodies: How Uncertainty and Variation Shape Early Experiences in Medicine by Anna Harvey Bluemel
A physician reflects on the uncertainty that comes with the study of the human body, and the unpredictability that comes with the pursuit of medicine.
Read moreHow a Doctor Learns to Act: A Reflection by Claire Unis, MD
“Am I becoming / something unfamiliar?” asks Lauren Fields in her poem “My First Mask Was a White Coat” and in that simple question she brings back for me the struggle of becoming. With our first medical school clerkships we don white coats and mimic our preceptors: some false confidence here, a prayer for invisibility there. Silent reassurances never spoken aloud: It’s okay to pretend at doctoring. That’s how you learn.
Read moreThe Cost of Efficiency and the Price of Empathy, a Reflection by Jordana Kritzer MD
After the long hours and intense learning curve of my Emergency Medicine residency, I had become one of those efficient robots who could solve medical puzzles and save lives, but I felt empty, disconnected—the classic symptoms of burn-out. I was once a wide-eyed, empathetic intern constantly criticized for trying to solve their patient’s chronic issues. I remember one attending saying, “Figure out the least amount of things you need to do to rule out an emergency.” I see now that he was trying to teach me efficiency.
Read more"Who is Black excellence for exactly?" A poem reflects on that question by medical student Michael Arnold
Michael Arnold is a medical student at Ohio State University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. His poem “Chronic Black Excellence” appeared in the Fall 2019 Intima.
Chronic Black Excellence by Michael Arnold
A hundred years ago, Abraham Flexner
Eulogized Black medicine.
The ink in his pen tattooed
A sleeve on the arm of systemic racism.
The idea that screamed off his report
And echoed the loudest throughout history
Was the notion that Black medicine
Was fundamentally inadequate.
For the last century, Black medicine
Has been self-medicating with Black excellence.
A treatment plan that may be just as bad
As the prevailing social illness.
Black excellence is a poisoned apple,
Being eaten by a Trojan Horse.
Side effects may include:
Elitist attitudes, reactionary logic
Burnout, brunch addiction
And respectability politics
The siren song of Black excellence
Has veered us completely off course.
It’s a self-appointed pedestal that
Makes us look down on the
People that we dreamed of healing.
It makes us want to walk away
From the neighborhoods that
Raised us and never look back.
Black excellence is a blade on
The tongue of Horatio Alger’s descendants;
White people who will cut and paste
Your story into anecdotal evidence
That absolves them of their privilege.
Black excellence is a weight that actively
Compresses our humanity,
Erasing the mere possibility
Of us being normal, regular or average.
It erases the relief of mediocrity
That many of our white colleagues
Comfortably enjoy during their careers.
Who is Black excellence for exactly?
What’s the message we are trying to send?
Who are we sending it to?
Are we trying to claim that we are better
Than the Black people who lifted us up
High enough to access the white-dominated
Space called Western medicine?
Are we trying to signal that we
Are one of the “good ones”?
Is it an attempt to exorcise the demons
Of ever-haunting stereotypes?
Or is it just our insecurities
Crying out, wanting desperately
For white people to finally believe
That we are adequate?
Michael Arnold is a medical student at Ohio State University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. His poem “Chronic Black Excellence” appeared in the Fall 2019 Intima.
Rooms with a viewpoint: The metaphorical power of hospitals and medical complexes in illness narratives By Priscilla Mainardi, RN
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.
Seeing beyond the Double Blind Study: A Reflection on Evidence-Based Medicine and Scientific Truth by Lily C. Chan
Courtesy wondermark.com
While evidence-based medicine and the double-blind study is certainly a valid lens through which to view illness and health... the marginalization of intangibles or unquantifiables such as the patient experience and physician-patient rapport is an unfortunate side effect.
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