HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE
“Anxiety” (left) and “Shadows of a Soul,” photos by Richa Sheth
CREATIVES IN MEDICINE BY ELAINE GUREGIAN
W
hy write about your feelings? Many NEOMED graduates understand the value more viscerally once they have had to tell a family that their beloved child was incurably ill or that the grandmother who held the generations together with her Sunday dinners didn’t make it through COVID-19. 20 C R E AT I N G
T R A N S F O R M AT I O N A L L E A D E R S
It’s not easy to go right back to work. “Physicians are privileged enough to see people at their highest of highs and lowest of lows. It’s a lot to reflect on,” says Richa Sheth, a second-year College of Medicine student and the president of a new student group called Creatives in Medicine. “There’s a huge push to incorporate humanities study into med-
ical education and treating patients — and teaching physicians that the arts can make us better physicians in general,” says Sheth, whose own forms of reflection include photography and writing. At NEOMED, where reflective practice has been around as long as the University (getting close to half a century), students are encouraged “not to only go about our medical education but also think about what it means to be a physician, to be a human, to have an illness — rather than a disease,” Sheth continues. The distinction? The students actually had a seminar on the topic to explore its nuances. “We learned that a disease is just a pathological process of the body, but an illness is what comes with the experience that a human has with that disease — so, how they are affected, how their family’s
