Narrative Medicine Collection

Here are a few of my current favorite narrative medicine/medical humanities things:

• Heart Murmurs: What Patients Teach Their Doctors (UC Medical Humanities Press, 2014). This new collection of personal narratives by physicians, edited by my colleague Sharon Dobie, MD, a family medicine doctor who teaches and practices relationship centered care. In these essays Dr. Dobie and thirty-five other physicians explore lessons they’ve learned from patients.
• Those whacky and wonderful Brits have a much better health care system than we do, and they have this wonderful new (creative) collection (is it a book? is it a collage?) on medical humanities. Published by the Wellcome Collection, Where Does It Hurt? The New World of the Medical Humanities is both entertaining and thought-provoking. (While you’re at it, spend some time browsing their website for fun quizzes, interactive educational games, videos, and more). Here’s what they say abut the book:
  “What does it mean to be well? Or ill? And who, apart from you, really knows which is which? Contemporary definitions of medicine and clinical practice occupy just one small corner of a vast field of beliefs, superstitions, cultures and practices across which human beings have always roamed in the search to keep themselves, and others, feeling well.The label ‘medical humanities’ is the best effort we’ve made so far to define the fence that encloses that very large field; recognising that it’s a space in which artists, poets, historians, film-makers, comedians and cartoonists – in fact every one of us – has as much right to explore as any humanities-schooled or clinically trained professional. This book is a walk through that field, a celebration of its rich diversity, a dip into some of the conversations that are going on within it, an attempt to get it in perspective – and an invitation to you to join the conversation yourself.”
• The always friendly folks in the middle of cornfields in Iowa (University of Iowa) put on a terrific annual narrative medicine conference: The Examined Life Conference. They just announced that a keynote speaker for their upcoming conference (April 16-18, 2015) is poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. His memoir A Place To Stand (Grove Press, 2002) was made into a documentary released last month.