Poetry and Medicine.

Poetry and medicine are related in multiple ways, including historical interests in healing, defined broadly, through words. More contemporary scholarship explores how poems, which include insights into the human condition, can enlarge our understanding of health, illness, mortality, and health care, including issues of diversity. Anesthesiology and poetry have particular affinities due to their structures, timeframes, and rhythms.

What's in a Word? Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Leadership Language in Anesthesiology Resident Feedback.

Background: Individuals who have agentic traits (eg, assertive, confident, competent) that are more commonly associated with men are often selected for leadership roles. For women, this poses a potential barrier to entry into the higher ranks of academic medicine.

Objective: We analyzed anesthesiology resident feedback for differences in the use of agentic descriptors using qualitative and quantitative methods based on resident gender and year of training.

The long-term impact of a comprehensive scholarly concentration program in biomedical ethics and medical humanities.

Background: There is a strong and growing interest in biomedical ethics and medical humanities (BEMH) within medical education for facilitating key components of medical professionalism and ethics, clinical communication and observational skills, and self-care and reflective practices. Consequently, United States (US) medical institutions have begun to incorporate BEMH through formal Scholarly Concentrations (SCs). This is the first study to examine the impact of a US BEMH SC, from student experience in medical school to post-graduate development, as perceived by graduate physicians.

Design and Implementation of a Perioperative Surgical Home at a Veterans Affairs Hospital.

The innovative Perioperative Surgical Home model aims to optimize the outcomes of surgical patients by leveraging the expertise and leadership of physician anesthesiologists, but there is a paucity of practical examples to follow. Veterans Affairs health care, the largest integrated system in the United States, may be the ideal environment in which to explore this model. We present our experience implementing Perioperative Surgical Home at one tertiary care university-affiliated Veterans Affairs hospital.

Charting Phelan's 'To Suffer a Sea Change'.

Physicians and healthcare workers usually perceive their medical record entries as documentation rather than construction. In the following article, we extract a medical record from a narrative, Peggy Phelan's pathography of glaucoma, 'To Suffer a Sea Change'. From information about encounters described by Phelan, an ophthalmologist reconstructs progress notes similar to those that would be key to a glaucoma patient's medical record.

Words and wards: a model of reflective writing and its uses in medical education.

Personal, creative writing as a process for reflection on patient care and socialization into medicine ("reflective writing") has important potential uses in educating medical students and residents. Based on the authors' experiences with a range of writing activities in academic medical settings, this article sets forth a conceptual model for considering the processes and effects of such writing. The first phase (writing) is individual and solitary, consisting of personal reflection and creation.

Survivor of that time, that place: clinical uses of violence survivors' narratives.

Narratives by survivors of abuse offer compelling entries into the experiences of abuse and its effects on health. Reading such stories can enlarge the clinician's understanding of the complexities of abuse. Furthermore, attention to narrative can enhance the therapeutic options for abuse victims not only in mental health arenas, but also in other medical contexts.