Pulse is an online magazine, arriving in the virtual mailbox once a week with a single carefully edited story or poem, usually about a medical encounter. Many contributors are physicians, nurses, or social workers, some still in training and others reflecting on decades in practice; other writers come to the medical encounter as the patient or the patient's relative. This collection of the stories and poems published in the first year of Pulse is organized by publication date rather than by theme; thus, in some ways it recreates the experience of receiving these writings, week by week, moving from perspective to perspective, from voice to voice to voice.