New article up on SYNAPSIS! Ashley Moyse, Director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives, writes about the Cooperatives' mission, Jonathan Swift's vision of the bee, and imagining a future for medicine of mutuality, discernment, and care. Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/06/17/s...

Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative's Effort in a Medical School - S Y N A P S I S

As a theologian and ethicist embedded within the clinical world, I came not as an expert with answers but as a witness and companion. I did not spin a web, like Jonathan Swift’s spider, drawing only f...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS this Friday! First, Jing Sun examines the year 1923, a critical moment in Japan-U.S. medical exchange in the years before WW2. How did American physicians regard their Japanese counterparts, and vice versa? Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/05/07/w...

When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II) - S Y N A P S I S

Strategically designed to foster understanding and appreciation of American ideas and practice of medical science, the visit of the 1923 Japanese medical commission to a great extent defined “American...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

New articles for the upcoming week from SYNAPSIS! Returning contributor Merve Şen writes on Ben Marcus's 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, and examines practices of amateur medicine and DIY-self care in the midst of an unsettling pandemic. Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/05/04/h...

Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet - S Y N A P S I S

In the book, an epidemic disease—language toxicity—strikes most of the world, and the children’s speech becomes lethal for their parents.

medicalhealthhumanities.com

A busy week at SYNAPSIS! Two new articles up today: first from Kathryn West, a review of the recent edited volume How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025). West examines the included essays with a particular focus on emphasizing the disabled voices. medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/29/b...

Book Review: How to be Disabled in a Pandemic - S Y N A P S I S

To read How to be Disabled in a Pandemic is to be thrust back in time to the beginnings of COVID-19 making its way through the United States, complete with the anxiety, isolation, and sense of forebod...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

NEW on SYNAPSIS this week: David Lombard writes on the complexities of hope in memoirs of mental illness and recovery. Is hope a universally positive emotion? How can we compare it to hope in other contexts, such as climate anxiety? Read it HERE: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/29/w...

Writing and Reading Mental Illness Narratives with Lucid Hope - S Y N A P S I S

Lucid hope as an analytical lens, for its part, contributes to problematizing hope (including in recovery narratives) as a complex emotion and/or orientation that requires critical scrutiny, and whose...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

#MedHums101 Medical humanities uses the arts, humanities & social sciences to improve our understanding of health and human experience. Explore articles on this theme to find out more 👉 thepolyphony.org/tag/arts-and...

arts and humanities – the polyphony

thepolyphony.org

Back in September 2024, members of @durhamimh.bsky.social travelled to Uppsala for a workshop on curating medical heritage in relation to pressing questions of indigeneity & reconciliation. The workshop was supported by seed funding from @matarikinetwork.bsky.social. Read the full report here!

The Polyphony @the-polyphony.bsky.social · 2y ago

Michaela Clark reports on the 3 day workshop 'Curating Medical Heritage: Reconciliation & Indigeneity' organised by Cecilia Rodéhn as part of the @matarikinetwork.bsky.social funded project Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities thepolyphony.org/2025/03/26/c...

Teaching incarcerated students is much like teaching any students, write @columbiauniversity.bsky.social scientists Tessa Montague and Shai Berman. Learn more about their experience teaching neuroscience at Sing Sing: tinyurl.com/yfkyjfej

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS! First, we are happy to host Pauline Picot's review of Matthew Nienow's new verse collection, "If Nothing," an unsparing memoir of addiction and recovery. medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/02/i...

"If Nothing" by Matthew Nienow - An Alphabetical Review - S Y N A P S I S

In Matthew Nienow's verse collection If Nothing (2025), the writing “I” looks back on his experience as a long-time addict.

medicalhealthhumanities.com

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS this week! First, Grace Kao explores the medical importance of a sense of purpose in life, especially for those with chronic illness. As she asks, "how does one reconstruct meaning when former touchstones have faded away?" medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/01/r...

Reinventing Purpose: Meaning-Making in the Face of Pain and Illness - S Y N A P S I S

For many of us, a sense of purpose is a fundamental psychological and existential need. In the clinical practice of pain psychology, these themes surface consistently through patients’ often raw and v...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

New this week on SYNAPSIS: Trishala Dutta writes on fungi as a mode of thinking about disability, ethics, and collective futures in the midst of capitalist ruination. Check out this fascinating piece here ⬇️ medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/24/f...

Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking  - S Y N A P S I S

Fungi offer not just metaphors but lived relations—kinships that embrace our permeability, particularly in the context of climate catastrophe, settler colonialism, racialized violence, and the biopoli...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

Also new on Synapsis! Do you find the best cure for writer's block a quick walk around the block? Matt Somerville writes on the history of walking as creative practice, and the new research behind it. Read it here! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/21/t...

Take a Hike, or Better Yet, a Walk: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head - S Y N A P S I S

In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to "go for a walk" and the instruction to...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

New on Synapsis! How can we speak of the singular traumas we collectively experienced during the COVID pandemic? Ingrid Berg reviews Days of Grace and Silence (2024), a remarkable new work of memoir and poetry by Ann E. Wallace. Read it here ⬇️⬇️ medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/16/c...

Capturing COVID-Era Isolation and Illness in Poems: A Book Review of "Days of Grace and Silence" - S Y N A P S I S

In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. W...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

NEW on SYNAPSIS: Nicholas Derda reviews Paul M. Renfro’s new book, The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (2024), and asks: how do we re-examine this history without reifying a whitewashed narrative about HIV/AIDS? Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/13/i...

"Innocent" and "Guilty" AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro - S Y N A P S I S

Nicholas Derda reviews historian Paul M. Renfro’s new book, The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (2024), which analyzes the figure of Ryan White both as a flesh-and-blood h...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

NEW on Synapsis! We're excited to publish Danielle Wilfand's new piece on the experience of undiagnosed illness as both patient and physician, and the value of #narrativemedicine in allowing us to live with the chaos such illness brings. Read it below: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/08/t...

The Chaos Narrative

It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, pie...

medicalhealthhumanities.com

Our first post on Bluesky! We are an open-access onl'ne journal based at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social, publishing work on medical and health humanities We're interested in anything that connects medicine with the humanities—critical reading, looking, listening.