UC Medical Humanities Consortium

The UCSF Conflict Competence Training for Managers is a course designed to equip managers, at all levels, but especially frontline managers, with the skills to recognize, assess and resolve conflicts that commonly occur in the workplace. The authors believe that developing conflict competence is a core skill that all managers need. Also, successfully managing conflict is a key component of a healthy, thriving work culture.

This UCSF CCTM Facilitator Guide is designed to document and share an innovative seven session model of training made up of the following core elements: skills development through role play with interactive case discussion; group and personal mentoring/coaching; and peer group meeting designed to build and sustain a conflict competent community-of-practice.

Can Breakdown Lead To… Breakthrough?    

Fresh out of medical school and uncertain what to do next, Dr. Calvin Bloom decides to take a road trip and spend a year focusing on his writing. What he expects to be a liberating journey of self-discovery is instead overshadowed by a mysterious illness that threatens to break him both physically and mentally.

Feeling helpless and defeated, Calvin returns home to Boston to recover—only to discover that the botched adventure was not in vain. In the end, the breakdown leads to a breakthrough: a deeper understanding of himself and what he wants to do with his life.

Under the mentorship of a retired doctor, Calvin opens the Bloom Center, a mental health clinic in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. But it’s his first patient, Kendall, who pushes him to begin Project Breakthrough—a revolutionary approach to healing that sparks radical personality changes. The therapy? Making people sick.

It’s Beshert is a biography of Dr. Jay A. Levy, a former professor of medicine at UC San Francisco. His pathbreaking insights into the fundamentals of HIV/AIDS deepened public understanding of the condition and helped save lives. The book captures the diversity of Levy’s life, including his upbringing in Wilmington, Delaware; the research obstacles he encountered at UCSF in the 1980s; and his extensive travels (and rich experiences) throughout the world. Levy is a strong believer in beshert – a Yiddish word for “destiny” or “fate” – and the concept is woven into his inspiring life story.

Archives of contemporary science are challenged with long-term responsibilities to preserve the records of a wide array of scientific work. Archivists need to respond to the requirements for wider access, diversity in the composition of the archive, ethics of access, privacy, and use, and must balance care and efficiency in archival processing. To respond to these challenges, the 4th Workshop on Scientific Archives was hosted by the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections on June 5 and June 6, 2024, in San Francisco. The workshop’s program was developed by members of the Committee on the Contemporary Archives of Science and Technology of the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives (ICA-SUV). This edited volume presents the contributions from this international gathering, with essays that suggest ways of fostering collaboration, forging partnerships, and building interdisciplinary dialogue among archivists, researchers, museum professionals, data scientists, and other stakeholders from across the globe.

The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility brings together six cutting-edge essays that expose how legal systems—through incarceration, detention, disability law, tort doctrine, and human subjects research—profoundly shape health outcomes and perpetuate structural inequality. From forced sterilizations in prisons to the hidden burdens of self-accommodation, the authors reveal how law can both cause and conceal harm, especially among marginalized populations. Blending bioethics, legal history, disability studies, and public health, this volume challenges readers to rethink what justice and autonomy mean in environments defined by surveillance, stigma, and institutional neglect—and calls for bold legal and structural reforms to achieve genuine health equity.

Narrative Rx: A Quick Guide to Narrative Medicine for Students, Residents, and Attendings presents a thoughtfully curated selection of the author’s finest literary insights alongside essays crafted to engage and educate medical trainees and practitioners alike.

Within these pages, you’ll discover a rich compilation of perspectives and stories designed to inspire empathy, compassion, and critical thinking. Written in the spirit of “show and tell,” this book serves as a model for writing narratives, directing students and practitioners alike. More than a guide to navigating and shaping the future of medicine, it equips readers with the tools to expertly and intelligently write about their experiences, insights, and reflections, ensuring that their voices – and their patients’ voices – contribute meaningfully to the ongoing conversation in health care.

In a market economy, it’s axiomatic that competition leads to lower prices. So why has just the opposite happened in American healthcare? Historians Brian Dolan and Steve Beitler show how key healthcare participants – physicians, patients, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospitals, and the federal government – have each contributed to ever-rising costs while pointing to others as the true culprits. This primer surveys the central arguments each sector has made over the last century to justify its prices. The book also shows where ultimate responsibility lies: the triumph of free-market principles that reward profitability at the expense of affordability, access, and cost-effectiveness. By examining the case each sector has made for its prices, Why Is U.S. Healthcare So Costly? A Brief History of (Not) Controlling Healthcare Costs in America offers a succinct account of how healthcare economics has defied the idea that competition reduces prices. 

This volume is the second of two that, together, include twenty-six articles written by European surgeons who visited America prior to the First World War.

Volume 1 provides background about nineteenth-century European-American surgical relationships and the massive European immigration to America that included some influential surgeons. This is followed by reports from nine surgeons who visited 1901-1907, translated into English, each with details about the original article, a brief author biography, and numerous annotations to clarify unfamiliar persons or concepts.

Volume 2 adds reports from fourteen European surgeons who visited 1908-1913, with similar source information, biographies, and annotations. Other surgical and medical visitors to America during this time are briefly discussed. Finally, the April 1914 International Surgical Society Congress in New York is described, followed by reports from three more surgeons who attended the Congress and participated in a tour of American surgical centers that followed it.

This volume is the first of two that, together, include twenty-six articles written by European surgeons who visited America prior to the First World War.

Volume 1 provides background about nineteenth-century European-American surgical relationships and the massive European immigration to America that included some influential surgeons. This is followed by reports from nine surgeons who visited 1901-1907, translated into English, each with details about the original article, a brief author biography, and numerous annotations to clarify unfamiliar persons or concepts.