The Word Doctor

“A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review’s editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language.” —The Word DoctorNew Scientist)

Ofri asks her medical students to write up patient histories as a first-person narrative, I presume in order to encourage greater empathy with the human patient. Several years ago, I found NYU’s excellent Medical Humanities website. Georgetown also has a site on Disability Studies in the Humanities, an interest that has arisen in part due to the near-obsession humanities scholarship developed in the study of “the body” in the 90s.