Medical Humanities and Arts

Welcome to the 27th issue of PLEXUS, UC Irvine School of Medicine's Journal of Medical Humanities & Arts. PLEXUS is an annual, medical-student-organized publication that proudly showcases the vast talents, diverse perspectives, and nuanced experiences of the greater UCI Health community through art. It is our mission to spark introspection, catalyze meaningful discussions, and ultimately apply the tenets of medical humanities to foster a cohort of compassionate healers.

This year, we present to you MOSAIC. Every person embodies an amalgamation of stories, identities, and lived experiences which shape their perspective on health and healing. Like the tessellated fragments of a mosaic, no single piece tells the whole story — and yet, each is irreplaceable. The practice of medicine benefits from looking at each situation through an interdisciplinary lens, considering the different facets of patients' lives, and thinking carefully about what defines their vision of well-being. While a mosaic may traditionally only be perceived as a whole, each piece is integral to creating a story — one that is textured by emotions, memories, and meaning. Medicine extends beyond the science of diagnosing and treating; it encompasses the art of listening, connecting, and weaving together the fragments of our humanity into a collaborative understanding of health. We sought to explore the mosaics that shape our journeys in healthcare — as students, physicians, and patients — and to honor the pieces, however small or fractured, that hold everything together. To look at a mosaic is to resist the impulse toward reduction — to resist the idea that a patient is a diagnosis, that a physician is a role, that a story can be collapsed into a chart note. Each fragment carries its own color, weight, and history. Arranged together, they produce something that no single piece could have predicted.

And yet, a mosaic is never truly finished. New hands place new pieces; old pieces can shift or be reinterpreted in a new light. It is a form that invites revision and resists the illusion of a fixed and final meaning. If there is resistance to be found in this concept, mosaic, it is in the insistence that fragmentation is failure — instead, these cracks are not flaws to be concealed, but the very lines along which light enters and meaning is made.

The works in this journal display a similar refusal of an easy resolution. They ask: what does it mean to be seen, partially and imperfectly, by another? What is lost when we smooth over the edges of a person's story for the sake of clinical efficiency? What is found when we dare to sit with the complexity, the contradiction, and the color of a life? Each contribution — whether poem, painting, story, or photography — is itself a tile: irreducible, essential, and radiant in its particularity.

We sincerely thank our advisors Dr. Juliet McMullin and Dr. Tan Nguyen for their guidance, and the UCISOM Medical Humanities & Arts Program and Department of Family Medicine for their continued support.

May what lives between these pages settle something in you, stir something within you, and remind you why this work matters.

—

Celina Yang & Rhea Gandhi

Editors-in-Chief

Huan Nguyen    Creative Review

Caroline Gee    Creative Review

Xi Yu    Design

Bohan Zhong    Design

Britney Weng    Design

Nicole Parker    Design

Hannah Cho    Creative Review

Justin Yang    Advisory

Sara Arahi    Creative Review