UC Medical Humanities Consortium

What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. The contributors wrestle with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic.

The release of the1964 Report on Smoking and Health was a true watershed event in public health. The New York Public Library has called the report one of the most important scientific publications of the twentieth century, as important as Albert Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Clearing the Air: The Untold Story of the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health provides the only behind-the-scenes account of how that seminal document was produced. This insider view, written from the perspective of five individuals who worked on the report, exposes the pressures and politics involved with preparing that landmark document and discloses many previously unknown facts about people and events that contributed to the report’s success.

Killing Fever is a new kind of book – an historical thriller that’s also an historical thrill. Historian and novelist Andy Warwick uses a mysterious death and wrongful arrest in 1857 to light the fuse on an explosive story of science, medicine, and empire. From a corpse in a dingy, London basement to the jungles of Bengal, Killing Fever builds a global history through the people who made it happen. Some are victors, some victims, but can you tell them apart? Visit the author's website: www.cybervictoriana.com for more information and resources.

Treating patients more humanely starts with promoting cultural competence and cultural humility. These concepts are critical to enhancing the medical experience for underserved communities and rebuilding their trust (confianza) in clinicians and the healthcare system. Given vast health-related disparities and their increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for innovative approaches to medical humanities is urgent. This collection brings together essays from both scholars and health practitioners that adopt either a cultural humility approach or a focus on social justice to shed new light on inequities. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, the medical humanities have a role in bringing down the barriers that prevent marginalized groups from having equitable access to health care. The essays address topics ranging from autism and aphasia to endometriosis, COVID-19, and Ebola with regions spanning the U.S., Latin America, and Africa.

Operated on as an infant, without anesthesia, Wendy began life at war with her body. In this literary memoir, Wendy takes readers on her difficult sensory journey toward healing, as she communes along the way with horseshoe crabs, dolphins, and other marine life that taught her the restorative power of beauty, resilience, and interdependence. Autobiography of a Sea Creature portrays the dissociative experience of trauma and the roots of self-destructive cycles, as well as the tragic results of medical beliefs at the time that infants could not feel pain. This book is both a love letter to the earth and a hopeful testament of humans’ capacity to heal our deepest wounds.

Intriguing parallels arise between contemporary end of life images and themes expressed historically in the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, the Catholic saint who is known as the “Little Flower.” Drawing on her combined experiences as a professor of the humanities at Rice University, and as an Artist In Residence in Palliative, Rehabilitation, and Integrative Medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the author examines topics such as the paradoxical grandeur of small things, the spiritual significance of flowers, compassion and consolation in the wake of human suffering, the power of mystical dreams and prophetic visions, and vibrant conceptions of eternal life. Ultimately, Saint Thérèse’s “little way” and contemporary end of life imagery emphasize the knowledge of the heart, which teaches how to see the hidden in everyday life, and how to recognize the dedication of love.

Female physicians were nearly invisible in the United States of the mid-1960s. The motivation and character of women who aspired to become physicians had never been the subject of serious inquiry until psychologist Lillian K. Cartwright, PhD, began a detailed study of the women entering the University of California, School of Medicine, from 1964 through 1967 and then carefully followed them for the next twenty-five years. To complete this historic, longitudinal study to span half a century, Susan E. Detweiler, MD, now narrates the complete arc of the professional and personal lives of this group of remarkable women who forged careers into leadership within the male universe of American medicine. Their individual stories are a testament to their intellect, motivation, and perseverance, told with the insight that only a member of the group could bring.

This volume provides a transcript of the meetings on Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity. The colloquia brought together scholars and experts who differ in their perspectives on how race has been understood and how it could, or should, be addressed in medicine; they questioned how we might do this in a way that achieves the best for our patients and the communities we serve. Sponsored by UCSF’s School of Medicine.