Medicine, Meaning, and Identity Essays from Early-Career Physicians

A critical care doctor becomes one of the first physicians in the United States to contract COVID-19. A pediatrician reflects on her father's passing during her final year of medical school. A Muslim surgeon contemplates whether residency has replaced his faith. An orthopedic surgeon wonders, after a decade of training, if he made the right choices after the death of his brother-in-law. An African American resident painfully asks: Do Black lives truly matter to white coats? For decades, medical humanists have advocated for attending to patients as "whole persons." So, too, the time has come to see physicians as "whole persons." In this urgent, moving collection of essays, a diverse group of early-career physicians write about common experiences in medicine--such as the grueling nature of internship and residency--from a fresh, up-to-date perspective. With particular attention how to the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity influence clinicians' experiences as caregivers, the featured practitioner-authors reflect on endurance, suffering, and the politics of wellness across their personal and professional lives, delicately capturing a new dimension of healthcare previously unfamiliar to wider audiences. Medicine, Meaning, and Identity invites readers to reconsider the doctor not as a hero, but rather as a complex, whole person; not merely as a healer, but as an integral community member in acute need of healing.

Nathan Carlin is the Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston), holding the Samuel Karff Chair. He has published numerous books, including Medical Humanities: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2019), Contemporary-Physician Authors: Exploring the Insights of Doctors Who Write (Routledge, 2021), and Pathographies of Mental Illness (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Dr. Carlin also is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Humanities. Keisha Ray is an Associate Professor and holds the John P. McGovern, MD Professorship of Oslerian Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston). She is the author of Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black Peoples Health (Oxford University Press, 2023), as well as various other publications exploring the effects of institutional racism on Black people's health. Dr. Ray's notable bioethics expertise is frequently referenced across various media outlets, including NPR, CNN, Rolling Stone, and Texas Monthly. Dr. Ray is Senior Associate Editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities.