PERICARDIAL MNEMOSYNE | Victoria Yuan

“Pericardial effusion on subcostal echocardiogram, with the effusion depicted as Mnemosyne, the river of memories in Greek mythology. This piece is inspired by a patient with a malignant pericardial effusion. They confided in me that they had been delaying treatment for their effusion and cancer because it exhumed memories of a loved one's battle with cancer — one woven with fear and exhaustion. This patient resonates with me as a reminder that medicine is made of science and stories, bounded by physiology and embedded with our experiences and memories.”

Victoria Yuan (she/her) is a third-year medical student and Sarnoff Fellow at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. She graduated from Stanford University, where she majored in Biomedical Computation, minored in Classics, and produced podcasts with the Stanford Storytelling Project. With interests in data science and art, Yuan is drawn to the numbers and narratives of medicine, lending context and color to statistics through patient stories.

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