People are always giving advice to cancer patients. Whether it is nutritional advice or doctor recommendations or tips on how to quell the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy, just as soon as people hear you are sick they usually want to find a way to help. Most of the advice is welcome and encouraging, though in […]
Graphic Medicine is a site that explores the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. You’ll find a growing collection of comic reviews, articles, podcasts, links, and coverage of our international Comics and Medicine Conferences. We encourage participation by academics, health carers, authors, artists, fans, and anyone involved with comics and […]
Pulse is an online magazine that uses stories and poems from patients and health care professionals to talk honestly about giving and receiving medical care. Pulse is also an online community, a chance for patients, doctors, nurses, social workers—everyone—to come together, share our experiences in health care, and explore our common wish for a humane system of […]
“No human thing is more universal than illness, in all its permutations, and no literary publication holds more credibility on the subject than the Bellevue Literary Review.” — NewPages.com (Read the full review.) Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, has been witness to nearly three centuries of human drama. In this tradition we […]
Hello! I’m Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, and Professor of Gerontology in Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College. The Legacy Project began in 2004, when I started collecting the practical advice for living of America’s elders. Using a number of different methods, my research team has systematically gathered nearly […]
A Piece of My Mind. Most essays published in A Piece of My Mind are personal vignettes (eg, exploring the dynamics of the patient-physician relationship) taken from wide-ranging experiences in medicine; occasional pieces express views and opinions on the myriad issues that affect the profession. If the patient(s) described in these manuscripts is identifiable, a Patient Permission […]
Battling infertility feels like being stuck on the side of the road without a spare tire. My life stands frustratingly still while I watch other women’s lives whiz past. I want to know why my body can’t make a baby, and I am willing to do whatever I need to do to get it fixed, which […]
About the Piece Nearly 40 years after Congress created a unique entitlement for patients with kidney failure, U.S. death rates and per-patient costs are among the world’s highest while the biggest for-profit providers flourish. To read the series, visit: Dialysis: High Costs and Hidden Perils of a Treatment Guaranteed to All About the Writer Robin Fields […]
About the Piece There’s a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where every America soldier injured in Iraq, Afghanastan, is brought, treated–if only for a few days–and sent home. Devin Friedman follows the story of a planeload of men and their week in this miraculous netherworld between war and peace, life and death. To read the whole […]
About the piece In the tragedy of Katrina, one hospital faced choices with the gravest of consequences. This article, originally published in the New York TImes, is part of an ongoing investigation. To read the piece and view the interactive components, visit http://www.propublica.org/article/the-deadly-choices-at-memorial-826 About the Writer Dr. Sheri Fink has reported on health, medicine and science in […]
About the Book Excerpt In this chapter from late in his autobiography Williams focuses on his subjective experience in caring for patients. The unusual truthfulness of patients in need, their “coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives,” inspires him both personally and artistically, as a poet. The things that patients reveal about […]
The Book In 1971, Smith returned to Japan for a third time and lived in the small fishing village of Minamata, with his wife Aileen. Although they planned to stay for only three months, the couple stayed for three years. Smith’s photos on a mercury poisoning scandal in Minamata were published in Asahi Camera, Camera […]
The Book This edited anthology, which includes poems, essays, short stories, and other creative forms (e.g., a radio diary, a letter to a social service agency), is organized into sections that include Body and Self, Diagnosis and Treatment, Womanhood, Family Life and Caregiving, Professional Life and Illness, and Advocacy. Most works found their way into […]
The Book A splendid photographic essay with an international perspective, Hospital ranges across national boundaries to record the realities and issues behind the scenes of one of the world’s essential institutions, the modern hospital. Many physicians will enjoy this interesting photographic essay.
The Book, Exhibit and Follow-up Video For four years, HIV-positive poet, River Huston, and photographer Mary Berridge traveled across the United States gathering the stories of women HIV-positive. The book, first published in 1997, sought to address the stereotypes and stigma associated with being HIV positive. Even though women were the fastest-growing segment of the […]
About the Book Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict is a culmination of 15 years spent photographing and interviewing men, women and children who have been on the frontlines of every major conflict of the past century. It is a portrait documenting the deep physical and psychological effects on the veterans whose bodies and minds […]
About the Book Facing Cancer is a life-changing event, one that prompts soul-searching and reevaluation of all that one holds true. In the years following their own cancer treatments, authors Elena Dorfman and Heidi Schultz Adams were left wondering, What difference has cancer made in other people’s lives? What does it mean to survive a […]
About the Project Medical science still cannot say what causes schizophrenia, but a few things are certain: that schizophrenia is global, that it shows up in just about every culture, and that it is very widespread. One out of every one hundred people in a given population are afflicted by schizophrenia (there are 2.5 million […]
The Book These images portray 34 adults from many different walks of life who struggle with a variety of issues related to their illnesses. They share their thoughts and feelings, including the disappointment of no longer being able to drive, the determination to remain employed, the affection for friends who also have a mental illness, […]
The Book Editors Smolan and Moffit have produced a powerful, emotive book, chronicling the last century of medicine’s progress. They searched over 600 photographic collections from around the world to find the most illustrative photos from such noted photographers as Walker Evans and Lewis Hine. Former New York Times health and science editor Richard Flaste’s […]
The Book Common Heroes is not a Hollywood rendition of heroic death, but rather an opportunity to explore with everyday people the pain, sorrow, anger, and even the humor when death touches us through those we love. What does it feel like to see your life within the framework of a life-threatening illness? How do people […]
About the Essay Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the […]
About the Project Each year for the last 11 years, Duke Pediatrician John Moses teaches a class called “Children and the Experience of Illness.” For this class, Duke undergraduates work closely with a child to teach them how to use a camera as a means of exploring illness — which either the child themselves or […]
The Book My Heart vs. the Real World is a photo documentary volume that explores the lives of children with congenital heart disease (CHD) through striking black-and-white photographs and interviews with subjects and their families. Ten chapters each spotlight a single child and in an additional chapter, the author writes about his own experience of […]
The Project The Waiting Room is a social media / documentary hybrid that tells the story of a county “safety-net” hospital in Oakland, California. To view, visit: http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/about-the-waiting-room/about-the-community-engagement-project/ Taking advantage of the fact that hundreds of people sit and wait for hours each day in Highland Hospital alone, we will transform the waiting room into a storytelling […]
About the Book and Author Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But on August 11, 1985, the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, and, before long, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” had […]
About the Book Eugene Richards’s seventh book, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue reaffirms his position as the premier chronicler of the dark side of American life. In it, he examines the ravages of drug addiction in three poor East Coast neighborhoods with the kind of precision and empathy that have netted him a long string of prizes. More […]
The Exhibit, Film and Book Over two years, Jessica Dimmock photographed a group of die-hard heroin users living on “The Ninth Floor” of a Manhattan building in a surprising, powerful, and intimate way. The tale of the terrible consequences of heroin abuse has been documented many times before, but Dimmock epitomizes the attitude of the […]
About the Story This Personal History piece, published in the June 20, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, chronicles the diagnosis and treatment of the author’s nine-month-old daughter’s brain tumor To read more, visit http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_hemon#ixzz1QizFyfiN About the Author Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project,which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National […]
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