Well Versed
In Medicine
In September, New York University will debut a new literary journal—but it won't be from the folks in the literature department. The Bellevue Literary Review will be published by New York University's Department of Medicine and the physicians who staff Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center, the oldest public hospital in the country. And this is just the latest incarnation of what seems to be a trend: the marriage of medicine and literary arts.

Don't doctors already have enough to do—keeping hearts thumping, lungs clear, limbs attached—without getting into the messy business of publishing poetry, prose, and fiction? "We all have some outside interest," says Danielle Ofri, M.D., a physician and teacher at NYU Medical Center and Bellevue as well as an editor of the journal. "Otherwise," she adds, "you'd go crazy in this field."

Ofri spends three days a week doctoring and the other two writing—mostly creative nonfiction. (Her essay "Merced" recently won the $1,000 Missouri Review Editors' Prize.) She is not the first to practice both of these vocations—William Carlos Williams and Anton Chekhov preceded her, as have others—but she and a growing number of medical professionals are now integrating the two disciplines in unexpected ways.

"Writing is an important critical skill in becoming a thinker and better doctor," says Ofri, who for the past three years has required her medical students to produce "narrative write-ups" of patients in addition to the standard, more clinical variety. Students are challenged to go beyond succinct diagnoses and consider "the patient's story" and "what it's like to have an illness." Ofri's not alone in her approach—her colleague Martin J. Blaser, M.D., chairman of NYU's Department of Medicine, requires similar writing assignments from his medical students. When the two physicians met last summer to discuss ways of further encouraging their students to write, the idea of creating a journal evolved.

Blaser now serves as its publisher and Ofri has been joined by two additional editors—Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., a fellow physician from NYU and Bellevue, and Ronna Wineberg, an attorney and fiction writer. The Bellevue Literary Review will be published biannually in the fall and spring. To encourage subscriptions, the first issue will be sent free of charge to 6,000 NYU alumni, with another 2,000 copies distributed both locally and nationally. The review, says Ofri, will not be a place for "doctors writing their little anecdotes" but a high-quality magazine for both health care professionals and the larger writing community.

Just a few miles from Ofri and her colleagues at Bellevue, physicians at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center have instituted an academic program in what they call "Narrative Medicine." Rita Charon, M.D., who heads the program, says it started as "a way to provide a locus for education research and scholarship in the narrative dimension of medicine." As part of the program, Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient and, most recently, Anil's Ghost) served as its first writer-in-residence. He taught two intensive literature seminars to classes comprising both medical students and doctors who were required to read works of contemporary fiction. Ondaatje also invited such writers as Joan Didion and Paul Auster to give readings. According to Charon, the seminars were "luminous," and students "learned about being fully conscious humans.

"Many people in the medical profession have realized that much of what's missing can be characterized as narrative competence, which is the ability to be moved by the stories of others, and narrative theorists have helped us to understand this," says Charon, who recently received funding to assess the outcome of narrative work in medicine. "I'm happy to say that we've documented that students who have a narrative component to their clinical training grow in their ability to recognize perspectives of others." As a result, says Charon, they have better relationships with both patients and colleagues.

The Bellevue Literary Review is one of a few journals that celebrate the creative results of incorporating writing into the practice of medicine. Another, Literature and Medicine, states its mission as the showcasing of "creative and critical work of renowned physician writers, leading literary scholars, and medical humanists." It is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press and sponsored by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the departments of English and Medical Education at the University of Illinois. A third such journal, Mediphors, describes itself as "a literary journal of the health professions," though it welcomes submissions from all writers.

Richard Selzer, M.D., is a contributing editor for Mediphors and one of the most famous members of the growing doctor-writer club. A retired surgeon, he has authored 10 books, including the popular Letters to a Young Doctor. According to Audrey Shafer, M.D., an associate professor of anesthesiology at Stanford, Selzer's writing is "the most widely used work in medical humanities courses." And Shafer, who is also a poet, should know. She is co-director of "Hybrids and Cyborgs: Melding Medicine and the Humanities," an interdisciplinary conference held annually at Stanford that aims to explore the connections between medicine and the humanities while encouraging dialogue among professionals in those fields. In February, Selzer was a featured speaker at the conference.

Even the medical profession's trade publications are on board. The Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, now features sections such as Poetry and Medicine and A Piece of My Mind. Readers can learn about the latest medical research on myocardial infarction and lipid peroxidation as well as read poems and personal essays about the more intimate, profound aspects of caring for patients.

While the physicians at NYU may not be the first to publish a literary journal, they hope their effort will rank among the best. The Bellevue Literary Review is accepting "previously unpublished works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and critical essays that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health, and healing." Submissions are open to all writers, and the deadline for the fall issue is May 15. For guidelines, write to The Bellevue Literary Review, Department of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016, or visit the Web site at http://www.blreview.org/.

Lori Isbell is a writer who lives in New York City.