The Covenant.

Burnout among doctors appears to be at epidemic proportions these days, with concomitant gushing prescriptions for wellness and resilience. But in reality, most doctors are not burned out in the traditional sense of the word: Most love taking care of patients and want nothing more than to be able to do just that. The source of the agony is the profession-or rather the corporatization of the profession-that has so impinged upon doctors' ability to practice medicine.

Medical Humanities: The Rx for Uncertainty?

While medical students often fear the avalanche of knowledge they are required to learn during training, it is learning to translate that knowledge into wisdom that is the greatest challenge of becoming a doctor. Part of that challenge is learning to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, a difficult feat for doctors who are taught to question anything that is not evidence based or peer reviewed. The medical humanities specialize in this ambiguity and uncertainty, which are hallmarks of actual clinical practice but rarely addressed in medical education.

Adding Spice to the Slog: Humanities in Medical Training.

Writing from personal experience, physician and author Danielle Ofri asks what evidence is needed to justify trying to humanize medical training via the power of literature.

The passion and the peril: storytelling in medicine.

Medical caregivers are always telling stories because stories provide meaning to much of their working lives. Although there is surely an element of shock value in the stories that medical professionals choose to share, the compulsion to tell a story is largely motivated by the profound emotions kindled by the clinical experience. This impulse needs to be recognized by the profession, even nurtured.

The debilitated muse: poetry in the face of illness.

Poetry is a supremely sensory art, both in the imagining and in the writing. What happens when the poet faces illness? How is the poetry affected by alterations of the body and mind? This paper examines the poetry of several writers afflicted by physical illness-poets of great renown and poets who might be classified as "emerging voices," in order to explore the interplay between creativity and corporeal vulnerability.