Jake Taylor is a fourth-year medical student at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah pursuing a career in general surgery. His clinical and scholarly interests include rural and global surgery, trauma care, health equity, and medical education. Through poetry and medical humanities, he explores vulnerability, stigma, and the role of compassion in caring for patients experiencing serious illness.
In clinic halls where silence drapes the walls, She wanders close, a breath both light and frail. With child she walks, though scarce she eats at all, And hunger’s specter shades her skin so pale. The charts recount her weary, whispered fears, Of weight, of size, the mirrors’ harsh replies; Her hollow eyes reflect the haunted years Where famine looms and reason slowly dies. Once, madness wore a coarser robe of shame, Labeled …
This essay describes Dining with Danger, a dance piece that uses movement and Hindu mythological imagery to portray the lived experience and physiological realities of anaphylaxis, highlighting the rapid progression of allergic reactions and the life-saving role of epinephrine. Drawing on the author’s personal experience with life-threatening food allergies, it also emphasizes the cultural misunderstandings, access barriers, and public awareness gaps that shape how allergies are recognized and managed. Video of performance included.
Because medicine reflects the commonality of human struggles, healthcare workers can see parallels between their patients’ lives and their own. This piece speaks to the impact that witnessing tough patient encounters can have on healthcare workers.
These poem stanzas help to provide further fidelity on the small specialty that is Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation (PM&R). While many other specialties focus on specific organs, “our organ” is function and this piece hopefully sheds some light on how we preserve it and improve it in all the patients we treat.
Medical student recollects hospitalization with pneumonia as a pivotal childhood experience that shaped his values. The care he received from dedicated clinicians and his family instilled trust and resilience, inspiring his pursuit of medicine. These reflections resurfaced during his white coat ceremony, affirming his commitment to embodying these principles in his future practice.
Food production and distribution and medical training and care have been similarly corrupted due to the prioritization of profit and emphasis on end results that value volume over quality by implementing assembly-line-like protocols. This has led to a crisis in preventable chronic disease, and a dearth of primary care physicians; both crises can begin to be healed through the use of small-scale, community based efforts utilizing biodynamic regenerative agriculture and local farmer’s markets, and the provision of care by Direct Primary Care family physicians who can provide affordable and accessible whole-person, whole-life care.
Lisa Roskes describes the many lessons learned from my close relationship with her grandmother. Despite choosing a career in pediatrics, these pearls guide her interactions with patients and their families.
The poem describes the profound impact of an encounter between Catherin Potin, the narrator, recovering from a motor vehicle accident, and a young patient with a similar experience. Throughout our interaction, the patient’s strength and resilience illuminate a path towards healing, showing the narrator the power of shared vulnerability in overcoming trauma. This encounter serves as a reminder of the reciprocal nature of healing in medicine and the personal growth that can arise from patient interactions.
Taylor Selby wrote this poem while trying to manage her time between studying for boards and her grandmas birthday party. To her, it means prioritizing her relationships and mental health while still working towards the goal to be an intelligent and caring doctor.
This piece is inspired by a patient encounter with a middle-aged woman who was recently diagnosed with a severe and malignant cancer. I saw her in the primary care setting, and she was undergoing chemotherapy at that time. She had a unique demeanor about her and she shared with me how she waited all her life to do the things she really wanted to do and now she was unable to do a lot of those things. She told me her and her friend now share a joke whenever they are debating doing something fun/risky/random in which they say, “What are you waiting for, chemo?”
Elise Kao MS3 encounters a struggling addiction patient in the Emergency Department who reinforces their determination to pursue psychiatry and advocate for forgotten patients.
Melinda Staub reflects on surgery as a both violence and healing, delving on medicine’s intricate ethical and practical landscape. Through an acrylic painting, she demonstrates her reflections on this topic.
Medical Student Contributing Writer
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
Melinda is an incoming general surgery resident at Indiana University School of Medicine. She is interested in medical education and addressing gender and racial disparities in medicine.
