The Arts and Medicine

Precis: In this chapter excerpt from Samuel Shem’s Man’s 4th Best Hospital, a 2019 sequel to the classic 1978 novel The House of God, Roy Basch reunites with the Fat Man to save a patient’s life, diagnose the ills of electronic health records, and train the next generation of patient-centered physicians.

In this Arts and Medicine feature, a visual artist uses a graphic drawing “comics” format to tell the story of her knee replacement in a New York hospital.

This Arts and Medicine feature describes use of author Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” in narrative medicine workshops to help residents explore hierarchies and the challenges of growing up professionally in their medical training programs.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews the case made by physician-essayist Lewis Thomas that all prospective medical students be required to know classical Greek language and literature before medical school acceptance and broadens the argument, calling on medical school admissions committees to require an undergraduate major in humanities as a basis for medical education.

In this Arts and Medicine feature, an early-career physician discusses the ongoing relevance of Samuel Shem’s novel, The House of God, to contemporary health care and medical education on the occasion of its 40th anniversary of publication.

In this Arts and Medicine feature, author Samuel Shem (pen name of Stephen Bergman, MD) reflects on the origins of his classic novel The House of God, the people and events that inspired its stories, the notion of “fiction as resistance,” and the evolving meaning of the book given developments in medicine and medical education in the 40 years since its publication.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews The Bleeding Edge, a Netflix documentary about the medical device industry and the harms that can come to patients when innovation, regulatory approval, and adoption of devices in practice outpace evidence of their safety and benefit.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews Three Identical Strangers and The Twinning Reaction, 2 documentaries telling the story of identical twins and triplets adopted as infants into separate families who were unknowing participants in a 2-decade nature vs nurture study of child development, beginning in 1960.

In this Medical News article, experts discuss how various arts program can help medical students see people with dementia in a positive new light.

This Arts and Medicine essay describes the growth of clinical role-play ASMR videos online, reviews what little is known about the ASMR phenomenon, and discusses it in the context of placebo response research.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews a museum exhibit devoted to the Bowery series, an early attempt at prostate cancer screening that recruited vulnerable men to undergo surgical prostate biopsies, and the career of Tod Dee Craig, the artist who illustrated the surgical procedures and findings.

This Arts and Medicine essay examines the art of Marilène Oliver, who uses data from medical imaging to create works representing the human form, thereby hoping to a forge a connection between clinical data and human expression and consciousness.

This Arts and Medicine feature reviews the American Ballet Theatre’s 2017 production of Richard Strauss’ Whipped Cream (Schlagobers), a collaboration between choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and pop surrealist Mark Ryden, which tells the story of a boy’s admission to and rescue from a nightmarish hospitalization.

This Arts & Medicine essay reviews the 2018-2019 Broadway revival of The Waverly Gallery, a Kenneth Lonergan play that tells the story of the effects within a well-to-do Manhattan family of the decline of a family member from progressive dementia.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, a book of essays, case studies, philosophy, history, and magical realism by Oxford-trained neuropsychologist Paul Broks that explores ideas about the brain, consciousness, and sense of self.

The Arts and Medicine feature reviews the film Beautiful Boy, a dramatization of journalist David Sheff’s 2008 memoir about his son’s descent into methamphetamine addiction and his tentative recovery.

This Arts and Medicine feature contains a heart-themed crossword puzzle.

This Arts and Medicine essay reviews the 2 best graphic medicine publications of 2018: Ellen Forney’s Rock Steady, about her approach to self-managing her bipolar disorder, and Marnie Galloway’s Slightly Plural, about overcoming cultural myths of pregnancy and motherhood to develop one’s own story of parenting.

This Arts and Medicine essay describes the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, a program that brings poets and facilitators to dementia care settings to reduce social isolation and nurture creative expression among older adults with cognitive deficits.