Where It Hurts

Where It Hurts invites us to peer into the space between health and illness, life and death, through the voices of the people who work on medicine's frontlines: doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more.

In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, they share what it's like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going. By turns conversational, spare, urgent, poetic, plain-spoken, heart-rending, and heart-mending, each piece offers a glimpse into the extraordinary daily realities of those charged with taking care of us at our most vulnerable. A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself while performing a life-saving procedure.

A nurse wrestles with caring for a woman accused of murder. A neurologist recalls how learning the art of pole dancing helped her through residency. A GI fellow serves us an unorthodox "cure" for an ER regular with a dangerous love for fajitas. A surgeon-poet imagines inviting Death over for tea. Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, hate, wonder, joy: They're all part of a day's work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.

About the Author

Donna Bulseco is the editor-in-chief of the journal of narrative medicine Intima and a longtime journalist and editor. She has graduate degrees in English literature from Brown University and narrative medicine from Columbia University. She is an editor and contributor to publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Self, InStyle, the Purist, and others. Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar and one of the founders of the field of narrative medicine. She completed her MD at Harvard Medical School and her PhD in English at Columbia University.

She is the Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine, Professor of Medicine, and founding chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. Her research in narrative medicine has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and many private foundations. She has authored, co-authored, or co-edited four books on narrative medicine.

The NEH, the NIH, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and numerous medical associations have honored her with awards and distinctions. She lectures and teaches internationally and publishes extensively in leading medical and literary journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Academic Medicine, Narrative, Henry James Review, Poetics Today, and SubStance.