Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal

Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative's Effort in a Medical School - S Y N A P S I S As a theologian and ethicist embedded within the clinical world, I came not as an expert with answers but as a witness and companion. I did not spin a web, like Jonathan Swift’s spider, drawing only f...

New article up on SYNAPSIS!

Ashley Moyse, Director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives, writes about the Cooperatives' mission, Jonathan Swift's vision of the bee, and imagining a future for medicine of mutuality, discernment, and care. Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/06/17/s...

Thresholds of the Body - S Y N A P S I S This spring, when I was recovering from a double mastectomy, I consumed a lot of media. Propped up on a wedge pillow as family and friends filtered through with food and news of the world outside, I b...

Next up, Sarah Roth discusses recovery from a double mastectomy, and the crucial supportive role of queer media (like FX's Dying for Sex and Miranda July's novel All Fours) and communities in their processes of self-fashioning. Read it here!

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/05/09/t...

When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II) - S Y N A P S I S Strategically designed to foster understanding and appreciation of American ideas and practice of medical science, the visit of the 1923 Japanese medical commission to a great extent defined “American...

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS this Friday!

First, Jing Sun examines the year 1923, a critical moment in Japan-U.S. medical exchange in the years before WW2. How did American physicians regard their Japanese counterparts, and vice versa? Read it here:

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/05/07/w...

Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet - S Y N A P S I S In the book, an epidemic disease—language toxicity—strikes most of the world, and the children’s speech becomes lethal for their parents.

New articles for the upcoming week from SYNAPSIS!

Returning contributor Merve Şen writes on Ben Marcus's 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, and examines practices of amateur medicine and DIY-self care in the midst of an unsettling pandemic. Read it here:

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/05/04/h...

Sex for the Dying: Palliative Kink and FX's Dying for Sex - S Y N A P S I S “The aspects of death and sex are intimately intertwined for both are part of life,” begins a 1968 article in the Journal of Sex Research; “This applies for the normally healthy human being in general...

Next, Emily Waples reviews the FX series "Dying for Sex," starring Michelle Williams. How does the show reflect current research on sex, illness, and dying, as well at the earlier podcast it was adapted from? Read it here:

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/30/s...

Book Review: How to be Disabled in a Pandemic - S Y N A P S I S To read How to be Disabled in a Pandemic is to be thrust back in time to the beginnings of COVID-19 making its way through the United States, complete with the anxiety, isolation, and sense of forebod...

A busy week at SYNAPSIS!

Two new articles up today: first from Kathryn West, a review of the recent edited volume How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025). West examines the included essays with a particular focus on emphasizing the disabled voices.

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/29/b...

Refusing to Tell the Polite Lie: Lessons on Courageous Veracity from Ivan Ilyich's Ethicist - S Y N A P S I S In Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the lesser-known and often underappreciated character of Gerasim—a young, poor, uneducated peasant with the unenviable task of...

And Dr. Peter A. DePergola II writes on the ethics of care, honesty, and the refusal to "tell the polite lie." What can Tolstoy teach us about shared vulnerability, of confronting death head-on, and of plain, authentic speech?

Read it below!
medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/28/r...

Writing and Reading Mental Illness Narratives with Lucid Hope - S Y N A P S I S Lucid hope as an analytical lens, for its part, contributes to problematizing hope (including in recovery narratives) as a complex emotion and/or orientation that requires critical scrutiny, and whose...

NEW on SYNAPSIS this week:

David Lombard writes on the complexities of hope in memoirs of mental illness and recovery. Is hope a universally positive emotion? How can we compare it to hope in other contexts, such as climate anxiety?

Read it HERE:
medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/04/29/w...

arts and humanities – the polyphony

#MedHums101 Medical humanities uses the arts, humanities & social sciences to improve our understanding of health and human experience. Explore articles on this theme to find out more 👉 thepolyphony.org/tag/arts-and...

Back in September 2024, members of @durhamimh.bsky.social travelled to Uppsala for a workshop on curating medical heritage in relation to pressing questions of indigeneity & reconciliation. The workshop was supported by seed funding from @matarikinetwork.bsky.social. Read the full report here!

Teaching incarcerated students is much like teaching any students, write @columbiauniversity.bsky.social scientists Tessa Montague and Shai Berman. Learn more about their experience teaching neuroscience at Sing Sing: tinyurl.com/yfkyjfej

Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim's "Care at The End of The World" - S Y N A P S I S Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025), makes clear – at the end.

And up next is Ajitpaul Mangat's review of Jina B. Kim's upcoming monograph Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing, out soon from Duke University Press. Check it out below:

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/31/i...

"If Nothing" by Matthew Nienow - An Alphabetical Review - S Y N A P S I S In Matthew Nienow's verse collection If Nothing (2025), the writing “I” looks back on his experience as a long-time addict.

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS!

First, we are happy to host Pauline Picot's review of Matthew Nienow's new verse collection, "If Nothing," an unsparing memoir of addiction and recovery.

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/02/i...

The Horror of Noncompliance: Instructional Language and Unruly Bodies in "The Substance" (2024) - S Y N A P S I S Loud and grotesque, “The Substance” centers misogyny, consumerism, and the centripetal vortex of capitalism’s demands on (re)productive labor. It shatters the possibility of suspension: both Elisabeth...

Next, Heather Glenny examines "The Substance" through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s concept of “lateral agency,” imagining a type of noncompliance that doesn’t rely on active agency. How can we read the film differently in this light? Read it here!

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/02/t...

Reinventing Purpose: Meaning-Making in the Face of Pain and Illness - S Y N A P S I S For many of us, a sense of purpose is a fundamental psychological and existential need. In the clinical practice of pain psychology, these themes surface consistently through patients’ often raw and v...

Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS this week!

First, Grace Kao explores the medical importance of a sense of purpose in life, especially for those with chronic illness. As she asks, "how does one reconstruct meaning when former touchstones have faded away?"

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/03/01/r...

Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives - S Y N A P S I S As a psychiatrist, the question of how to respond to “the experience that medicine can’t describe,” particularly when that experience invokes the supernatural, is important. How should I, a medically ...

And Sabina Dosani writes on two illness narratives - Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America and Hilary Mantel’s 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost - through the lens of the supernatural, and offers a reparative reading which takes seriously the spectral.

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/25/g...

Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking  - S Y N A P S I S Fungi offer not just metaphors but lived relations—kinships that embrace our permeability, particularly in the context of climate catastrophe, settler colonialism, racialized violence, and the biopoli...

New this week on SYNAPSIS:

Trishala Dutta writes on fungi as a mode of thinking about disability, ethics, and collective futures in the midst of capitalist ruination. Check out this fascinating piece here ⬇️

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/24/f...

Take a Hike, or Better Yet, a Walk: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head - S Y N A P S I S In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to "go for a walk" and the instruction to...

Also new on Synapsis!

Do you find the best cure for writer's block a quick walk around the block? Matt Somerville writes on the history of walking as creative practice, and the new research behind it. Read it here! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/21/t...

Capturing COVID-Era Isolation and Illness in Poems: A Book Review of "Days of Grace and Silence" - S Y N A P S I S In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. W...

New on Synapsis!

How can we speak of the singular traumas we collectively experienced during the COVID pandemic?

Ingrid Berg reviews Days of Grace and Silence (2024), a remarkable new work of memoir and poetry by Ann E. Wallace. Read it here ⬇️⬇️

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/16/c...

"Innocent" and "Guilty" AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro - S Y N A P S I S Nicholas Derda reviews historian Paul M. Renfro’s new book, The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (2024), which analyzes the figure of Ryan White both as a flesh-and-blood h...

NEW on SYNAPSIS:

Nicholas Derda reviews Paul M. Renfro’s new book, The Life and Times of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (2024), and asks: how do we re-examine this history without reifying a whitewashed narrative about HIV/AIDS?

Read it here:
medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/13/i...

The Chaos Narrative It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, pie...

NEW on Synapsis!

We're excited to publish Danielle Wilfand's new piece on the experience of undiagnosed illness as both patient and physician, and the value of #narrativemedicine in allowing us to live with the chaos such illness brings. Read it below:

medicalhealthhumanities.com/2025/02/08/t...

Home - S Y N A P S I S Synapsis: A health Humanities Journal. Our mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, and we see ourselves as a “Department Without...

All of our articles are available on our website, here:

medicalhealthhumanities.com

Our first post on Bluesky! We are an open-access onl'ne journal based at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social, publishing work on medical and health humanities

We're interested in anything that connects medicine with the humanities—critical reading, looking, listening.