This collection reflects the diverse ways arts, design, and humanities can be integrated into healthcare practice.
Do you know of a resource that highlights the connection between art, design, humanities, and healthcare? Please suggest a resource here.
Members of the Gold community express the human connection through different forms of artistic expression, including visual art, photography, dance, video, poetry, and narrative writing. The collections in our Art Gallery feature work showcased at Gold Humanism Conferences, shared via the Golden Glimmer project, and other digital galleries.
The Gold Foundation and NYU Langone Health’s Division of Medical Humanities have partnered on the Humanities in Healthcare newsletter, a monthly compilation of articles, events, and opportunities related to the arts and humanities in healthcare. Launched in February 2023, this newsletter is a joint version of NYU’s popular Medical Humanities newsletter.
FRAHME is a free resource from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) offers resources to help medical educators start, develop, and/or improve the use of arts and humanities in their teaching.
This collection from NYU School of Medicine
features literature, fine art, visual art and performing art annotations created for those with an interest in medical humanities.
What if your doctor could prescribe you a poem, or your therapist could refer you to a museum? Each of these could contribute to your health and well-being, which is what the practice of “arts on prescription” aims to do. The Arts on Prescription Field Guide, assembled by collaborators from the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mass Cultural Council, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and Harvard University, offers an in-depth resource for communities that wish to formally integrate arts and culture into health and social care systems.
ShareTools is a free resource to support health professions educators seeking to integrate humanities-based, anti-racism education for their learners. This resource leverages the power of the health humanities as a pedagogical tool, providing a comprehensive facilitator’s guide, detailed instructions for implementing curricular modules, an image library, and a collection of relevant music. Modules cover a variety of topics relevant to reflection, conversation, and action around racism, and draw upon a number of disciplines, including art, literature, anthropology, and the history of medicine.
For related resources, visit our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism collection.
Pallidocs offers a handful of short films and reflection prompts are created to offer community, inspire conversation, and find new meaning in the context of experiencing a serious illness.
RX/Museum, developed by a consortium of educators and physicians at Penn Medicine, The University of Pennsylvania, and leading museums and arts institutions across Philadelphia features a curated series of 52 artworks and essayistic reflections that embody the interplay between museums and medicine.
The Penn Listening Lab celebrates listening as essential to the work of healing. In amplifying the voices of patients, caregivers, staff, and providers, it embodies the tenets of patient centered care, nurtures a culture of caregiving, and provides an innovative complement to traditional approaches to medical education and measurement of patient experience.
The Good Listening Project offers healing arts programs with the mission to cultivate resilience and wellbeing in healthcare communities. They use listening and poetry to facilitate meaningful group conversations among colleagues, strengthening the social fabric within healthcare systems and contributing to a culture where people care about each other’s wellbeing.
Ten Tensions: A photographic exploration of the physician’s inner life is a collection of ten photographs, each paired with a narrative contextualizing the image within medical literature and philosophical discourse. Every photograph-narrative duet aims to address a specific ethical-humanistic “tension” that clinicians may encounter in daily practice.
Reflective MedEd is a blog dedicated to reflective practice in medical education and care of the person. They publish contributions from educators, patients, and others that foster awareness of the human dimension of doctoring and develop advocates for the just and equitable treatment of all patients. It is supported by Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
The Medical Humanities blog works in tandem with the leading international journal Medical Humanities, providing a place for succinct scholarly interventions into the conversation around medicine, as practice and philosophy, as it engages with humanities and arts, social sciences, health policy, medical education, patient experience and the public at large.
The Health Humanities Consortium promotes health humanities scholarship, education, and practices that focus on intersections among the humanities, arts and social sciences and health, illness, and healthcare. Resources include a curricular toolkit, annual conference, ways to engage, and more.
The Journal of Medical Humanities is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that publishes innovative research, creative scholarship, poetry, essays, reviews, and short reports in the health humanities. Articles aim to engage central questions, dilemmas, challenges, and imaginative opportunities that the health humanities offer.
Ars Medica is one of Canada’s first health humanities journals, providing an online venue for dialogue, meaning-making, and the representation of experiences of the body, health, wellness, and encounters within the medical system. Content includes narratives from patients and health care workers, including fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. They also include sections on writing by and about children, international health, and other voices routinely silenced in the healthcare system.
The International Health Humanities Network offers a global platform for innovative humanities scholars, medical, health and social care professionals, voluntary sector workers and creative practitioners to join forces with informal and family carers, service-users and the wider self-caring public to explore, celebrate and develop new approaches in advancing health and wellbeing through the arts and humanities in hospitals, residential and community settings.
Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal was founded to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres. Interests include historical précis, new takes on books, investigations into cognition and imagination, and medical practice.
The Polyphony is an online platform for those aiming to stimulate, catalyse, provoke, expand and intensify conversations in the critical medical humanities, hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK.
Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health through exhibitions, collections, live programming, digital, broadcast and publishing, we create opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art.
Graphic Medicine explores the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare, reflecting work and ideas from a community of academics, health carers, authors, artists, and fans of comics and medicine.
The Jefferson Health Design Lab brings people from different backgrounds together and promote inclusive design in healthcare, inside and outside the walls of the hospital, through innovative projects and collaborations.
Doctors Who Create is a collection of articles and art pieces intended to be a hopeful source of inspiration for people in the medical field and change the culture of medicine to encourage and reward creativity.
The Examined Life Conference is annual convening organized by The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine explores the intersections between the arts and medicine through discussions and presentations on how the arts can be used in medical education and patient and provider care.
The Empathy Project is a series of photographic portraits with 2- to 3-minute long stories shared by patients of Howard Grill, a cardiologist and photographer, that highlights the joy that a healthcare worker can experience in taking the time to learn about patients as people. Learn more about it through this article.
Women of Color on the Front Lines: Portraits of Unsung Heroes aims to challenge the narrative about who in this country is on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 by honoring black, indigenous, and women of color physicians and other healthcare workers with portraits reflecting their determination, talent and tireless work. Healthcare workers from around the country submitted photos of themselves from the front lines, and artists transformed these photos into art. Each portrait is a powerful reminder of the sacrifices these women make daily to serve the communities in which they live and work.
Have you ever wanted to create a humanistic library at your institution? The Pediatric eBook Library’s mission is to create eBook Libraries in hospitals and medical centers to promote the happiness and healing of pediatric patients. This resource offers instructions for streamlining the implementation process, choosing which device to purchase, selecting culturally and age-appropriate books, establishing security measures, fundraising, and more.
EMRemix offers free playlists and songs that reflect themes and messages related to health equity. Click on Episodes to listen and About to learn more about the creators.
A Journal of the Plague Year captured stories from around the globe relating to people’s lived experiences during the early period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Visit “Browse the Stories” or the interactive “Global Pandemic Map” to access archived stories and articles.
This list of healer’s art quotes from various individuals read like a healer’s prayer and offer prompts for contemplation about the art of healing.
This book, developed through The Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, provides a starting place for clinicians or scholars committed to learning about, teaching, or practicing Narrative Medicine. Authored by Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colón, Danielle Spencer, Maura Spiegel. Published by Oxford University Press.
This article in JAMA, by Rita Charon, MD, PhD, asserts that effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, defined as the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others, and that medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, offers a model for humane and effective medical practice — and why.
Explore more articles published by Rita Charon via PubMed.
Seek inspiration from published authors featured in our Reading Corner that includes summer reading lists, book reviews, and Bookshop.org site, and other collections that focus on medical humanities.
Gold Nuggets was a series of articles published by the Gold Foundation between 2014-2016 that showcased select works of art and writing that were intended to stimulate discussion and reflection. It includes this article by Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig about using essays written by medical students to teach humanism to other medical students.