Kimberly R. Myers

Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient care

Graphic stories, or adult themed comics, are a popular new cultural trend. Michael J Green and Kimberly R Myers argue that they are also a valuable tool for medicine

Storytelling: A Novel Intervention for Hypertension

In this issue, Houston and colleagues report that listening to stories of other patients with hypertension reduced blood pressure among African Americans with poorly controlled hypertension. The ed...

Humanities Mini-Course Curricula for Midcareer Health Professionals at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

The field of medical humanities has traditionally focused on medical students and, more recently, on premedical undergraduates. Comparatively little formal humanities pedagogy has been dedicated to midcareer health professionals. To address this lack, the Department of Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center designed eight annual humanities mini-courses for faculty and staff throughout the college and medical center.These mini-courses fell into four categories: reading, reflection, and discussion; creative expression; technology; and ethics. They were geared toward midcareer health professionals who were seeking new intellectual and creative stimulation and variety in daily routine. They also provided humanities faculty the opportunity to devote attention to topics that capitalize on their professional training and that interest them personally.Participants indicated a high degree of satisfaction with the mini-courses for four principal reasons: (1) learning the tools and methodologies of a new discipline or domain other than biomedicine, (2) using their minds and training in uncustomary ways, (3) forming new alliances with colleagues (which served to lessen the sense of professional isolation), and (4) enjoying a respite from the stressful flow of the workday. Humanities faculty facilitators provided more mixed responses but agreed that conducting the mini-courses had been a positive overall experience.Although this article provides a foundational framework for the development of a humanities mini-course series, the authors encourage others to replicate these curricula in other medical settings as an important step toward a robust pedagogy designed for midcareer health care professionals.

W. B. Yeats's Steinach operation, Hinduism, and the severed-head plays of 1934-1935.

In the mid-1930s, William Butler Yeats wrote two plays that feature a poet figure who confronts his muse and is subsequently beheaded. In The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March, Yeats symbolically processes a complex nexus of concerns in his life at the time: long-standing writers block, his immersion in Hindu thought, and the sexual impotence that contributed to his decision to undergo the often misunderstood genito-urinary Steinach operation in April of 1934. Yeats was predisposed to trust the medical theories behind the Steinach operation because they corresponded with ideas about sexuality and mental vitality he found in Hinduism.

The Paradox of Mindfulness: Seamus Heaney’s “St Kevin and the Blackbird”

When the acute fatigue of, say, a long weekend on call becomes chronic—a relentless grind of heavy clinics day in and day out, and after-hours charting—even physicians who are earnestly committed to mindful engagement with their patients can lose the ability to stay fully present. In his poem about the sixth-century Irish St Kevin, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney offers an encouraging perspective on mindfulness in the midst of exhaustion.1 In keeping with his general preference for private moments that reveal something essential about a person’s character, Heaney presents Kevin in this poem less a perfectly pious saint than a humble, warm-hearted man who takes his responsibilities to all living creatures quite—and quietly— seriously. From this vantage point, it is not difficult to draw comparisons between Kevin and any number of physicians who give fully of themselves to those who are entrusted to their care. One day as Kevin is going about the ordinary business of his life as a monk, praying in his small, isolated beehive hut in Glendalough, a blackbird lands in his outstretched palm and begins to build a nest in