About this chat
This is a special joint chat with the Association of American Medical College’s (AAMC) Council of Faculty and Academic Societies (CFAS). The chat is scheduled to occur during the Learn Service Lead 2019: The AAMC Annual Meeting, held this year in Phoenix.
During the first half of the chat, we will discuss two poems that explore learning experiences (scroll down to find the poems). In the second half, leaders from CFAS will lead a discussion on the role of the medical humanities and undergraduate and graduate medical education.
We will be joined by special guests Anna Reisman, MD, Director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and Michael Vitez, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and Director of Narrative Medicine at Temple University's Lewis Katz School of Medicine.
**For this collaborative chat, we will use two hashtags: #MedHumChat and #CFASChat
An Intern’s Recollection of a Night at the VA, July 2004
by Doug Hester
After the code,
a perfusing rhythm back
and a new chest tube to suction,
my chief offered
some feedback on
my central line:
the needle was
in the wrong place,
just like me.
Starfish
by Mary Oliver
In the sea rocks,
in the stone pockets
under the tide’s lip,
in water dense as blindness
they slid
like sponges,
like too many thumbs.
I knew this, and what I wanted
was to draw my hands back
from the water – what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid.
But I stayed there,
I crouched on the stone wall
while the sea poured its harsh song
through the sluices,
while I waited for the gritty lightning
of their touch, while I stared
down through the tide’s leaving
where sometimes I could see them –
their stubborn flesh
lounging on my knuckles.
What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun
loving what is easy?
it never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful:
all summer
my fear diminished
as they bloomed through the water
like flowers, like flecks
of an uncertain dream,
while I lay on the rocks, reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.