Art Meets Medicine at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Tell us about your collaborative project, Journal for Health Equity. How did this project come about?

When we first joined the faculty at UIC, before meeting, we both coincidentally designed our English 161 research writing courses for the First Year Writing Program around the theme of health and health care–Kim’s 161 was focused on health disparities and Bridget’s 161 on illness narratives. For Bridget, this focus aligned with her scholarly work in the field of medical humanities; her first book Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel, brings together Irish studies and death studies in its examination of the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse; her current book project focuses on Irish modernist novels, mental illness, and institutions of care. For Kim, this focus aligned with her concurrent work in Public Health; she taught writing in the Prematriculation Program for SPH and co-taught Public Health 410, a course that examines contemporary and historical issues in public health as reflected in literature. Between us, there was a shared interest in how people experience doctoring and healing differently, how systemic barriers and biases in the health care system mediate that experience, and how stories can, ineffably, convey those experiences with nuance that data alone cannot.

And we both were struck by how intensely our pre-health students were engaged by these questions–drawn to thinking about health equity through the lens of narrative and drawn to experimenting with narrative craft to forge a deeper connection with their audiences.

In 2020, we began talking about collaborating to develop a new health humanities course for English–one that would specifically investigate the discourse of mental health: how the rhetoric of “madness” and its “cure” has evolved over the course of psychiatry’s troubled history, how treatment has been withheld from or imposed on certain groups as a tool of social control, how we’ve reached the current crisis in mental health care and mass incarceration of the mentally ill, and how narrative–in the form of memoir, medical journalism, creative nonfiction generally–can serve, with complexity, to explore these questions. From this, in the summer of 2021, came our new course in the Professional Writing minor, English 388, Writing for the Health Professions: From Madness to Mental Health.

Can you share a moment or student project that made you think, “This deserves a wider audience”?

The realization that this writing deserves a wider audience was cumulative rather than being tied to one moment or student project. In conversations about ENGL 388 and other classes we talked about how great the student writing we were reading in our classes was and how important the topics that they were writing about were. We realized that the potential they had to shape more public discourses on issues ranging from the social determinants of mental health to racial biases in medical care. The JHE has not only provided students with a forum to participate in these discourses, it has also instilled confidence in them about their own writing and opened new dialogues about the future of healthcare.

How did your teaching experiences in English, Public Health, and the Honors College shape the journal’s interdisciplinary focus?

As mentioned above, our various teaching experiences in English, Public Health and the Honors College raised our awareness that students were intensely interested in the topics relating to illness and medicine, and to mental illnesses particularly, which led to the creation of English 388, all of which contributed to the formation of The Journal for Health Equity. In Spring 2023, Bridget taught English 388 for the first time, while Kim taught a new course she developed for Honors College, Honors 142: Creative Writing in Medicine. In both classes, students–pre-med, pre-nursing, pre-pharmacy students, but also students in English and other disciplines–expressed enthusiasm for reading and writing about health care outside the bounds of conventional academic writing; they had not read Ofri or Aviv or Gawande or Sandy or Sacks or Kalanithi or Ikpi or Forney or Mukherjee or Chekhov or Machado, to name a few. In these courses students were given the opportunity to engage with these writers and health humanities themes and were invited to write in ways that sought not just to argue, but also to engage the reader’s emotions: to move and to surprise.

We talked together about how impressed we were with the extraordinary writing our students were producing in 161, 142, and 388–how invested they were in their topics and their craft, how many said it was the class that ignited or renewed a genuine love of writing. So many final projects were deserving of a wider audience, we decided to start a journal to showcase work across genres–poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, research, and visual art–that engaged questions of health equity. In Spring 2024, we launched the first issue.

Has anything surprised you in this work?

Student interest in this topic is unsurprising: healthcare and particularly the treatment of care of mental illnesses is something that resonates deeply with college students, especially given the increasing crisis in care and rising cost of health insurance. However, the students’ depth of interest in these topics and their investment in this research is a welcome surprise. The variety of topics in the JHE alone is astonishing in the best ways possible. The essays and creative writing pieces cover topics such as colorism, secondhand smoke on the CTA, hysteria and borderline personality disorder, and the role of psychedelics in medicine, to name a few!

How do you see this journal supporting students—academically, professionally, or personally?

How to get published–it’s a tough question to help students with, because the landscape of journals is such inscrutable terrain. It’s not easy to suss out which journals seek the kind of thing you write. And it’s not evident at any given place who’s reading or what they’re looking for or what means they have to respond to submissions. It feels like such a crap shoot. The time it takes to play those odds and persistently send out work to strangers, then wait months for a response, or none at all . . . it’s formidable for anyone, let alone our students, many of whom carry superhuman courseloads while working to fund their education.

And yet to publish is such validation for any writer–for those of us prone to self-doubt, it’s an irrefutable message: your writing reached at least one person of discriminating taste (the editor, anyway) who found it meaningful. That can be a transformative experience, and it’s important for students to have access to it. It gives them something to work for that is more meaningful than a grade.

And for our many pre-health majors, it’s affirmation that they are not just good test-takers and STEM-fact-metabolizers–they are masterful writers, with awareness of the complex factors underlying health disparities, and a capacity for perspective-taking and empathy, all of which are critical to do justice to the full humanity of the patients they will serve. Both narrative medicine and health equity are gaining traction as key parts of med school curricula. So to have a publication that showcases all these skills as an undergrad applying for grad school in the health professions–it can’t hurt.

So rather than send students on the wild goose chase of sending out their work to random journals, we decided to create our own.

How do you define “health humanities,” and why is it important in today’s academic and social landscape?

Like the older and somewhat more established field of medical humanities, the health humanities is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that puts humanities disciplines such as visual arts, creative writing, music, literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences into dialogue with medicine. The aim of medical humanities is often perceived as seeking to improve the clinical skills of medical practitioners in terms of analysis and observation, and to shift to a more empathetic patient-centered model. The impact of health humanities is more cross-pollinating than one-directional in the sense that humanities disciplines are increasingly a source of valuable insights into the human experience of illness, the global healthcare system, and the human consequences of medical intervention.

As Michael Blackie and others have usefully articulated, the health humanities are less focused on improving the doctor/patient relationship and more interested in nonclinical contexts and the social determinants of care. Drawing from disability studies and feminist intersectional theories, health humanities scholars are interested in the structural and institutional factors that shape individual experiences of health, viewing medicine as only one of many other social and cultural factors. Health humanities are thus crucially important in today’s academic and social landscape at a time when scientific knowledge is being devalued, and the cost of healthcare is rising to unprecedented levels. Health humanities give us a way of interrogating the institutional and cultural structures that perpetuate health disparities, and it provides a framework for health advocacy and justice.

What has it been like working as collaborators?

For me it’s been fantastic. I come at this as a former art major, animator, creative writer, and teacher–but I’m no scholar. My toehold in academia is precarious at best. I’ve been grateful to have Bridget’s expertise as a true scholar in the field of medical humanities. And it’s wonderful to have a partner to source promising candidates and help review and respond to JHE submissions. As a huge bonus, Bridget has spectacular taste in fiction, so we’ve bonded over our love of, among others, modernists like Elizabeth Bowen. And as co-convener of the Irish Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library, Bridget is profoundly well-read–she has introduced me to current Irish writers I was glad to know of and would not have otherwise, like Caoilinn Hughes. I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator. – Kim

I don’t think anyone could find a more assiduous and creative co-editor than Kim. Her commitment to finding new ways to champion our students both inside and outside the classroom is inspiring. She is also a brilliant writer and a fantastic interlocutor, and we have had many wonderful discussions of our shared research interests in mental healthcare and its intersections with literary narrative and creative non-fiction, as well as our own lived experiences of navigating complex medical systems. It has been fantastic to work with someone who is so organized and attentive to detail and has such a depth of knowledge of creative writing and the visual arts. It is truly a joy to work with her on the journal and to be able to showcase fabulous student writing, and on a personal level, to exchange writing tips and reading recommendations. – Bridget