Recent medicalhumanities_perspectives items

The UCSF Conflict Competence Training for Managers: A model for building a workplace community of practice - Facilitator’s Guide

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The UCSF Conflict Competence Training for Managers is a course designed to equip managers, at all levels, but especially frontline managers, with the skills to recognize, assess and resolve conflicts that commonly occur in the workplace. The authors believe that developing conflict competence is a core skill that all managers need. Also, successfully managing conflict is a key component of a healthy, thriving work culture.

This UCSF CCTM Facilitator Guide is designed to document and share an innovative seven session model of training made up of the following core elements: skills development through role play with interactive case discussion; group and personal mentoring/coaching; and peer group meeting designed to build and sustain a conflict competent community-of-practice.

UCSF Conflict Competence Training for Managers: Accompanying Slides

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

UCSF Conflict Competence Training for Managers: Accompanying Slides

Bedridden: A Novella

Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Can Breakdown Lead To… Breakthrough?

Fresh out of medical school and uncertain what to do next, Dr. Calvin Bloom decides to take a road trip and spend a year focusing on his writing. What he expects to be a liberating journey of self-discovery is instead overshadowed by a mysterious illness that threatens to break him both physically and mentally.

Feeling helpless and defeated, Calvin returns home to Boston to recover—only to discover that the botched adventure was not in vain. In the end, the breakdown leads to a breakthrough: a deeper understanding of himself and what he wants to do with his life.

Under the mentorship of a retired doctor, Calvin opens the Bloom Center, a mental health clinic in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. But it’s his first patient, Kendall, who pushes him to begin Project Breakthrough—a revolutionary approach to healing that sparks radical personality changes. The therapy? Making people...

The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility brings together six cutting-edge essays that expose how legal systems—through incarceration, detention, disability law, tort doctrine, and human subjects research—profoundly shape health outcomes and perpetuate structural inequality. From forced sterilizations in prisons to the hidden burdens of self-accommodation, the authors reveal how law can both cause and conceal harm, especially among marginalized populations. Blending bioethics, legal history, disability studies, and public health, this volume challenges readers to rethink what justice and autonomy mean in environments defined by surveillance, stigma, and institutional neglect—and calls for bold legal and structural reforms to achieve genuine health equity.

Archives of Science: Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Archives of contemporary science are challenged with long-term responsibilities to preserve the records of a wide array of scientific work. Archivists need to respond to the requirements for wider access, diversity in the composition of the archive, ethics of access, privacy, and use, and must balance care and efficiency in archival processing. To respond to these challenges, the 4th Workshop on Scientific Archives was hosted by the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections on June 5 and June 6, 2024, in San Francisco. The workshop’s program was developed by members of the Committee on the Contemporary Archives of Science and Technology of the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives (ICA-SUV). This edited volume presents the contributions from this international gathering, with essays that suggest ways of fostering collaboration, forging partnerships, and building interdisciplinary dialogue among archivists, researchers,...

Narrative Rx: A Quick Guide to Narrative Medicine for Students, Residents, and Attendings

Fri, 9 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Narrative Rx: A Quick Guide to Narrative Medicine for Students, Residents, and Attendings presents a thoughtfully curated selection of the author’s finest literary insights alongside essays crafted to engage and educate medical trainees and practitioners alike.

Within these pages, you’ll discover a rich compilation of perspectives and stories designed to inspire empathy, compassion, and critical thinking. Written in the spirit of “show and tell,” this book serves as a model for writing narratives, directing students and practitioners alike. More than a guide to navigating and shaping the future of medicine, it equips readers with the tools to expertly and intelligently write about their experiences, insights, and reflections, ensuring that their voices – and their patients’ voices – contribute meaningfully to the ongoing conversation in health care.

Why Is U.S. Healthcare So Costly? A Brief History of (Not) Controlling Healthcare Costs in America

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a market economy, it’s axiomatic that competition leads to lower prices. So why has just the opposite happened in American healthcare? Historians Brian Dolan and Steve Beitler show how key healthcare participants – physicians, patients, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospitals, and the federal government – have each contributed to ever-rising costs while pointing to others as the true culprits. This primer surveys the central arguments each sector has made over the last century to justify its prices. The book also shows where ultimate responsibility lies: the triumph of free-market principles that reward profitability at the expense of affordability, access, and cost-effectiveness. By examining the case each sector has made for its prices, Why Is U.S. Healthcare So Costly? A Brief History of (Not) Controlling Healthcare Costs in America offers a succinct account of how healthcare economics has defied the idea that competition reduces prices.

The European Discovery of American Surgery Volume 2: Surgical "Mecca"

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This volume is the second of two that, together, include twenty-six articles written by European surgeons who visited America prior to the First World War.

Volume 1 provides background about nineteenth-century European-American surgical relationships and the massive European immigration to America that included some influential surgeons. This is followed by reports from nine surgeons who visited 1901-1907, translated into English, each with details about the original article, a brief author biography, and numerous annotations to clarify unfamiliar persons or concepts.

Volume 2 adds reports from fourteen European surgeons who visited 1908-1913, with similar source information, biographies, and annotations. Other surgical and medical visitors to America during this time are briefly discussed. Finally, the April 1914 International Surgical Society Congress in New York is described, followed by reports from three more surgeons who attended the Congress and participated...

The European Discovery of American Surgery: Volume 1 Land of Unlimited Possibilities

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This volume is the first of two that, together, include twenty-six articles written by European surgeons who visited America prior to the First World War.

UCSF Department of Urology: The First 100 Years, 1917-2017

Wed, 8 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This volume celebrates the centenary of the Department of Urology at the University of California, San Francisco. It examines four epochs of the department’s history, corresponding to the four chairs over the hundred-year period, discussing its clinical services, research programs, and community engagement.

Doctors and Patients: History, Representation, Communication from Antiquity to the Present

Mon, 6 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time, a book considers the doctor/patient relationship in the long period and from a broad geographical perspective. Historians, anthropologists and doctors reflect on the factors that, from the Classical age until the present, have altered the care relationship and the power relations embedded within it. The book also highlights that communication and narration, understood as constitutive aspects of care, are the elements which link the past to the present. From the encounter between religion and medicine to the centuries-long struggle between doctors and patients in defence of their respective positions, from medical dramas to efforts to humanize medicine, the book describes the doctor/patient relationship in all its cultural, transnational and transtemporal dimensions.

Paths to Innovation: Discovering Recombinant DNA, Oncogenes, and Prions, in One Medical School, Over One Decade

Fri, 3 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In less than a decade, scientists located within 200 yards of one another identified the first cancer genes, discovered that a protein by itself can transmit an infectious disease, learned how to clone DNA, and founded the biotech company that created a new industry. The four discoverers, wild cards in the academic deck—Herbert Boyer, Michael Bishop, Harold Varmus, and Stanley Prusiner—came to San Francisco between 1966 and 1970, where they were joined by a cadre of face card leaders determined to transform a provincial campus into a major center for biomedical research. Their stories show that money and facilities are necessary but not sufficient for creative biomedical innovation. More crucially, the best discoverers respond to the lure of adventure and require freedom and time to tackle and solve hard problems in their own way. Rather than follow prescribed paths, real innovators need to roam free.

Killing Fever

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Killing Fever is a new kind of book – an historical thriller that’s also an historical thrill. Historian and novelist Andy Warwick uses a mysterious death and wrongful arrest in 1857 to light the fuse on an explosive story of science, medicine, and empire. From a corpse in a dingy, London basement to the jungles of Bengal, Killing Fever builds a global history through the people who made it happen. Some are victors, some victims, but can you tell them apart? Visit the author's website: www.cybervictoriana.com for more information and resources.

Clearing the Air: The Untold Story of the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The release of the1964 Report on Smoking and Health was a true watershed event in public health. The New York Public Library has called the report one of the most important scientific publications of the twentieth century, as important as Albert Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Clearing the Air: The Untold Story of the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health provides the only behind-the-scenes account of how that seminal document was produced. This insider view, written from the perspective of five individuals who worked on the report, exposes the pressures and politics involved with preparing that landmark document and discloses many previously unknown facts about people and events that contributed to the report’s success.

Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. The contributors wrestle with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs,...

Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Operated on as an infant, without anesthesia, Wendy began life at war with her body. In this literary memoir, Wendy takes readers on her difficult sensory journey toward healing, as she communes along the way with horseshoe crabs, dolphins, and other marine life that taught her the restorative power of beauty, resilience, and interdependence. Autobiography of a Sea Creature portrays the dissociative experience of trauma and the roots of self-destructive cycles, as well as the tragic results of medical beliefs at the time that infants could not feel pain. This book is both a love letter to the earth and a hopeful testament of humans’ capacity to heal our deepest wounds.

Medical Humanities, Cultural Humility, and Social Justice

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Treating patients more humanely starts with promoting cultural competence and cultural humility. These concepts are critical to enhancing the medical experience for underserved communities and rebuilding their trust (confianza) in clinicians and the healthcare system. Given vast health-related disparities and their increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for innovative approaches to medical humanities is urgent. This collection brings together essays from both scholars and health practitioners that adopt either a cultural humility approach or a focus on social justice to shed new light on inequities. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, the medical humanities have a role in bringing down the barriers that prevent marginalized groups from having equitable access to health care. The essays address topics ranging from autism and aphasia to endometriosis, COVID-19, and Ebola with regions spanning the U.S., Latin America, and Africa.

A Rose From Two Gardens: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Images of the End of Life

Fri, 5 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Intriguing parallels arise between contemporary end of life images and themes expressed historically in the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, the Catholic saint who is known as the “Little Flower.” Drawing on her combined experiences as a professor of the humanities at Rice University, and as an Artist In Residence in Palliative, Rehabilitation, and Integrative Medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the author examines topics such as the paradoxical grandeur of small things, the spiritual significance of flowers, compassion and consolation in the wake of human suffering, the power of mystical dreams and prophetic visions, and vibrant conceptions of eternal life. Ultimately, Saint Thérèse’s “little way” and contemporary end of life imagery emphasize the knowledge of the heart, which teaches how to see the hidden in everyday life, and how to recognize the dedication of love.

Women Physician Pioneers of the 1960s: Their Lives and Profession Over a Half Century

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Female physicians were nearly invisible in the United States of the mid-1960s. The motivation and character of women who aspired to become physicians had never been the subject of serious inquiry until psychologist Lillian K. Cartwright, PhD, began a detailed study of the women entering the University of California, School of Medicine, from 1964 through 1967 and then carefully followed them for the next twenty-five years. To complete this historic, longitudinal study to span half a century, Susan E. Detweiler, MD, now narrates the complete arc of the professional and personal lives of this group of remarkable women who forged careers into leadership within the male universe of American medicine. Their individual stories are a testament to their intellect, motivation, and perseverance, told with the insight that only a member of the group could bring.

Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This volume provides a transcript of the meetings on Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity. The colloquia brought together scholars and experts who differ in their perspectives on how race has been understood and how it could, or should, be addressed in medicine; they questioned how we might do this in a way that achieves the best for our patients and the communities we serve. Sponsored by UCSF’s School of Medicine.

Imagining Vesalius: An Ekphrastic, Scholarly, and Literary Celebration of the 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Imagining Vesalius is a collection of ekphrastic works - poetry, prose, watercolors and sculpture – celebrating the 1543 landmark anatomical atlas by Andreas Vesalius. Using the stunning woodcuts in this famous book as inspiration, writers and artists have contributed prose poems and art works on subjects ranging from a parent's autopsy to immortality through dissection, murder, organ donation to amputation to the role of women in dissection to the anatomy of gaze. Introductory essays discuss Vesalius's place in the history of medicine, Vesalius as seen by a modern day poet, and a contemplative reflection on Vesalius's contributions to the development of dissection. A section of translation presents seven poems to or about Vesalius by famous contemporaries or near contemporaries, including Philip Melanchthon and Jakob Balde. Four appear for the first time in English. A rich anthology of Vesaliana, Imagining Vesalius will prove of interest to readers and scholars alike,...

The Remarkables: Endocrine Abnormalities in Art

Mon, 2 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Remarkables: Endocrine Abnormalities in Art

Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America

Sun, 1 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America

In Peril, In Prospect

Tue, 6 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In Peril, In Prospect

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

Tue, 6 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

Remembering Paul Beeson: A Tribute from His Students, Residents, and Colleagues

Tue, 6 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Remembering Paul Beeson: A Tribute from His Students, Residents, and Colleagues

Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins

Heart Murmurs: What Patients Teach Their Doctors

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Heart Murmurs: What Patients Teach Their Doctors

From Bench to Bedside, To Track & Field: The Context of Enhancement and its Ethical Relevance

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From Bench to Bedside, To Track & Field: The Context of Enhancement and its Ethical Relevance

Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center

Humanitas: Readings in the Development of the Medical Humanities

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This reader reprints critical essays published over the course of a 100-year history that grapple with the challenges of defining and justifying the presence of humanities instruction in medical education. It provides insights to some of the newer approaches that branch out from the familiar subjects of history and literature to include theater, art, poetry, and disability studies. With a comprehensive historiographical introduction as well as prefaces to each article, including new reflections by many of the authors themselves, the volume enables reflection on how the diversity of disciplinary perspectives and multiplicity of theoretical frameworks relate to each other historically and thematically. This volume is an invaluable resource for anyone engaged with humanities in health care education.

A History of Neurological Surgery at UCSF, 1912-2015

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A History of Neurological Surgery at UCSF, 1912-2015

Bioethics and Medical Issues in Literature

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Many of the bioethical and medical issues challenging society today have been anticipated and addressed in literature ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Albert Camus’s The Plague, to Margaret Edson's Wit. The ten works of fiction explored in this book stimulate lively dialogue on topics like bioterrorism, cloning, organ transplants, obesity and heart disease, sexually transmitted diseases, and civil and human rights. This interdisciplinary and multicultural approach introducing literature across the curricula helps students master medical and bioethical concepts brought about by advances in science and technology, bringing philosophy into the world of science.

Tell Me Again: Poetry and Prose from The Healing Art of Writing, 2012

Sun, 18 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For more than a decade The Healing Art of Writing conference has sought to strengthen compassionate understanding between healthcare providers and those who seek a state of well-being beyond the reach of surgery or pharmacology. Together, the participants share the belief that being cured of disease is not the same thing as being healed, and that a practice of expressive writing promotes both spiritual and physical healing. The writings presented at the 2012 conference, collected here in Tell Me Again, are a powerful testament to that belief. Within these pages you will hear, again and again, words of truth, words that uplift, words that heal.

The Firefly Project: Conversations about what it means to be alive

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Firefly Project: Conversations about what it means to be alive, presents true dialogues about living and dying, hopes and dreams, grief and loss. These stories show human beings connecting through the old-fashioned art of letter-writing. Adults with life-threatening illnesses move beyond ideas of themselves as ill or disabled, and discover they have much to give back. Their correspondents – teenagers and medical students, none of whom have yet met their pen pals in person – discover empathy and find time to focus on others rather than exclusively their own thoughts and concerns, grappling with difficult questions about patients’ experiences. The Firefly Project has become a repository of intergenerational dialogues full of rare and compassionate insights into the meaning of life, illness, and death.

The Supreme Triumph of the Surgeon's Art': Narrative History of Endocrine Surgery

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Endocrine surgery – the subspecialty of general surgery involving diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands as well as the endocrine pancreas – is a rapidly growing field of medicine that has a rich and fascinating history. As recently as the mid-19th Century, surgery for thyroid goiter was described as “horrid butchery” and believed by many to be too dangerous for any surgeon to attempt. Through the ingenuity and tireless efforts of surgeons in Europe and the U.S., thyroidectomy became a safe and even elegant operation, one that renowned Johns Hopkins surgeon William Halsted would describe in 1926 as representing “the supreme triumph of the surgeon’s art.” In this unique and captivating book, these and other seminal stories from the history of endocrine surgery are vividly retold by the current leaders in the field.

Health Travels: Cuban Health(care) On and Off the Island

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This collection of essays challenges static and binary discourses regarding the Cuban healthcare system, bringing together papers that paint a nuanced and dynamic picture of the intricacies of Cuban health(care) as it is represented and experienced both on the island and around the world.

To Feel What Others Feel: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How is it that people in search of healing were at one time able to experience the therapeutic effects of "animal magnetism"? The evidence suggests that those who went in for treatments we would now call placebos didn’t feign their sensations but felt what they supposed others felt; they reacted as social beings. In one way or another, so do we today. But while the feeling of membership buoys us and may contribute to health, that is not all it can do, medically speaking. In this study a humanist looks at the placebo effect, taking into account both its history and its ambiguity and bringing out the more questionable potential of some health fashions, trends, and movements of our own time.

What to Read on Love, not Sex: Freud, Fiction, and the Articulation of Truth in Modern Psychological Science

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What to Read on Love, not Sex examines Sigmund Freud’s career-long reliance on tragedy, myth, scripture, and art to articulate a psychology of love. The author, a neurologist and psychiatrist at Harvard, rethinks Freud’s relevance for modern psychology.

Patient Poets; Illness from Inside Out

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt vehicle for articulating the often isolating experiences of pain, fatigue, changed life rhythms, altered self-understanding, embarrassment, resistance, and acceptance.

Health Citizenship: Essays in Social Medicine and Biomedical Politics

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Health Citizenship: Essays in Social Medicine and Biomedical Politics

The Healing Art of Writing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The pieces in The Healing Art of Writing bring together caregivers and patients who share a passion for writing about the mysterious forces of illness and recovery. A belief shared among all contributors is that being cured of a disease is not the same as being healed, and that writing poetry and prose brings us to a place of healing. Our subject is the body, our medical experiences widely diverse; our goal is to express through literature what happens when a physical or mental anguish disrupts our lives.

At Work in The World

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of Occupational and Environmental Health. From the conference that took place in San Francisco, CA, USA, June 19-22, 2010.