HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE

“Anxiety” (left) and “Shadows of a Soul,” photos by Richa Sheth

CREATIVES IN MEDICINE

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

Why write about your feelings?

Many NEOMED graduates understand the value more viscerally once they have had to tell a family that their beloved child was incurably ill or that the grandmother who held the generations together with her Sunday dinners didn’t make it through COVID-19. It’s not easy to go right back to work.

“Physicians are privileged enough to see people at their highest of highs and lowest of lows. It’s a lot to re ect on,” says Richa Sheth, a second-year College of Medicine student and the president of a new student group called Creatives in Medicine. “ ere’s a huge push to incorporate humanities study into medical education and treating patients — and teaching physicians that the arts can make us better physicians in general,” says Sheth, whose own forms of re ection include photography and writing. At NEOMED, where re ective practice has been around as long as the University (getting close to half a century), students are encouraged “not to only go about our medical education but also think about what it means to be a physician, to be a human, to have an illness — rather than a disease,” Sheth continues. e distinction? e students actually had a seminar on the topic to explore its nuances.

“We learned that a disease is just a pathological process of the body, but an illness is what comes with the experience that a human has with that disease — so, how they are a ected, how their family’s

Art work by fourth-year College of Medicine student Sohi Mistry

life is a ected — and how one de nes oneself in the world with that disease,” says Sheth.

Creatives in Medicine was started this fall to create a community of students who are likeminded or have an interest either in practicing their own form of art or in learning more. Sheth, the president, is happy to have drawn students from all three Colleges: “It’s awesome that it’s a more collaborative community. We’re getting to mix and intermingle.”

This fall, students from the group helped launch a series titled COVID Diaries in e Pulse — NEOMED’s internal daily e-newsletter. For the group’s rst activity, alumnus Marcus Julius, M.D. (’94) — a NEOMED instructor who writes when he’s not practicing medicine or teaching — led a “table read” of one of his screenplays, with students invited to read through part of a script with him.

Sheth says the Creatives are working to establish relationships with regional arts organizations and hospital art programs for activities to come. Rachel Bracken, Ph.D., an assistant professor of family and community medicine who co-leads the Re ective Practice curriculum for students in the College of Medicine, recently made her own discoveries about the e ect of humanities training.

When she co-authored an article titled “Re ective Writing about NearPeer Blogs: A Novel Method for Introducing the Medical Humanities in Premedical Education,” she found that students bene ted from starting humanities training early — before they ever got to medical school.

“Students expressed feeling more optimistic and inspired about their future careers, knowing that their near-peers were writing about empathy and humanism in medicine and stated that they felt they better understood the medical school experience after reading the near-peer blog posts,” concluded the qualitative research study.

It’s forthcoming in the December issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities.