This week’s reading asks where care becomes thinner when clinical work treats expertise, evidence, conscience, access, or collaboration as a technical matter alone. I. 🎞️ How we represent suffering shapes how we are able to attend to it Representing Trauma: Artistic Decisions in Black Earth Rising Synapsis: A Health Humanities
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A stethoscope that once belonged to someone else. A folded drawing a child pressed into your hand on the ward. A sentence a patient said years ago that you still hear when you lock the car at night. This month we invite you to write to three words: What We
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Most medical students learn to write reflection the way they learn to take blood: reluctantly, under supervision, and mainly to get signed off. The portfolio wants a reflective entry, so one gets produced (and increasingly, with the help of AI). It describes an event, names an emotion, cites a model
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A call for humorous research that the BMJ declined, and that nobody else has since known what to do with Objective To offer a modest home for research articles written in the style of the BMJ Christmas issue, rejected by the BMJ Christmas issue, and then rejected by every other
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Medical Humanities Weekly Digest — 12 October 2026 This week’s selection turns on a recurring tension in healthcare: services need dependable methods, yet their legitimacy depends on whose knowledge, language, history, and vulnerability those methods are able to hold. Every link below was opened and verified as free full text
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On Dear You, the version I could get a ticket to, and the language that changes a consultation I couldn't get a ticket to the Teochew version. It sold out in two hours, then sold out again in batches as the cinemas kept adding sessions, so what I
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At three in the morning a ward sounds different. A pump alarms and is silenced. The man in bed four is awake and pretending not to be. The registrar on call eats biscuits standing up at the nurses' station, and in the corridor a daughter sits in a plastic
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On a recent trip to visit my parents in the Philippines, I found this painting hanging on the wall of their home. Its back bore my name and age - four years old, handwritten by my mother in her classic Catholic school penmanship. She gave us full freedom to paint “anything”
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I was recently reminded of how amazing our hands are when I injured my left hand. It was difficult for me to do many tasks that I once took for granted As I was bemoaning my own plight one day, I was called to assist an MO to remove an
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I look toward the sky As evening begins to gather… Layers of pale blue, soft gray, And rose spilling across the horizon, Colors so gentle They seem to beg me, Set it down. Set aside the fear that has wrapped itself Around me like a python, Tightening its grip Until
Keep reading →Personal essays from clinicians, nurses, allied health. The on-call you remember. The patient who stayed with you.
The view from the bed, the bedside, the waiting room. We especially want these — they matter the most.
Lyric, narrative, speculative, silly, mournful. Written on the back of a rounds sheet.
A teddy bear. A box of unopened tea. Write about one object and the story it holds.
Anything you want to look at carefully and tell us about.
A paragraph. A sketch. A single sentence on a post-it. The easiest place to start.
HEART started because medical humanities can sound like a closed club. We don't want to run that room. We want to run the pantry next door, where people come in, make a kopi, and tell you something they haven't been able to say all week.
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