The Arts and Medicine

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews journalist Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman, a 2022 follow-up to John Berger’s classic 1967 A Fortunate Man, detailing changes over 50 years in the rewards and challenges of primary care practice in small-town rural general practice in northern England.

This Arts and Medicine feature tells the story of a patient with undiagnosed illness caught in the futile administrative cycles of the US health care system.

This Arts and Medicine essay describes creation of a batik art installation titled Risktalk, illustrating trends in mentions of public health and non-health risk-related topics in popular written media from 1810 to 2009.

This Arts and Medicine feature summarizes events and scholarship honoring Abbot Gregor Mendel, founder of the science of modern genetics, on the occasion of the bicentennial of his birth.

This Arts and Medicine feature discusses the continuing relevance of the 1983 poem Gaudeamus Igitur by John Stone, which offers wisdom and guiding principles about the practice of medicine to newly graduated young physicians.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews The Mould That Changed the World, a musical about the history of penicillin that uses fringe set design, eccentric staging, and quirky lyrics to teach audiences the importance of antimicrobial stewardship.

This Arts and Medicine feature excerpts a chapter from The Covenant of Water, the new novel from Abraham Verghese, which follows the lives of a family in South India over the 20th century who have a “condition” that consigns at least 1 member per generation to death by drowning.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews the 2019 movie Collective, which documents corruption underlying poor patient outcomes in the Romanian national health system and provides an update on the people and reform efforts featured in the film.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews The Collected Schizophrenias, a 2019 essay collection by Esmé Weijun Wang about her experiences living with schizoaffective disorder.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews 2 books published in 2022: a clinical ethics graphic medicine casebook illustrating how ethical dilemmas in clinical practice play out in real situations; and a graphic public health comics anthology showing how comics meet the needs of risk communication and health promotion.

This Arts and Medicine feature describes use of improvisational theater techniques to train health care workers to have persuasive and respectful conversations with vaccine-hesitant patients about accepting COVID-19 vaccination.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just the Plague, a fictionalization of a historic 1939 plague outbreak in Moscow that has parallels with the 21st-century coronavirus pandemic.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews the work of visual artist Paula Siniatkina, who has used her experience as a patient previously quarantined and treated for tuberculosis to create art intended to represent and destigmatize the disease.

In this essay, the Arts and Medicine editor reviews features in the section over the past 5 years, covering visual arts, culture, design, performance, history, and more, and offers welcome to future contributions.

This Arts and Medicine feature describes a surgeon’s creation of a block print inspired by the otherworldly appearance of an Ebstein anomaly during cardiac valve repair surgery.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews how 21st-century evidence-based approaches to the use of psychedelic medicine replicate the ancient practices of Asclepian medicine.

This Arts and Medicine feature reintroduces 2 modernist classical music pieces composed in the 1980s for physician audiences that express key themes from the Oath of Hippocrates.

This Arts and Medicine feature describes a primary care women’s writing group in which patients joined a physician and psychologist to share personal experiences through journal entries and support each other through health and other challenges over the years.

This Arts and Medicine feature summarizes representations of the coronavirus pandemic in the storylines of serial medical dramas that aired between November 2020 and May 2021.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews 2 outstanding graphic novels of 2021: Coma by Zara Slattery, about the author’s delirium while being treated for streptococcal sepsis and multiorgan failure, and Parenthesis by Élodie Durand, about her experience with tumor-induced seizures.