The Healing Muse: Fall 2011

The Healing Muse is SUNY Upstate Medical University's journal of literary and visual arts published annually by the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. Since 2001, The Healing Muse has published stories, poetry, and essays that focus on illness and medicine in order to foster stronger communication and understanding for those involved in all aspects of health care. Volume 11 introduces new authors and artists and a few old friends. They offer us full portraits of people caught in their own pivotal moment; we ache with some and triumph with others. But always walk away enriched and even ennobled by our shared humanity. The Healing Muse was begun to foster dialogue between those experiencing illness and those attempting to treat and care for them. Showcasing writers from the local community and around the country, the journal offers compelling and moving insights into the contemporary and controversial subjects surrounding today's health care: families coping with difficult diagnoses; tense, unsettling moments in waiting rooms; the difficult nature of invasive procedures and their follow-up treatments; the complex and ethical dilemmas patients and physicians face when grappling with their health. In The Healing Muse, readers hear the voices of real people affected by real illness alongside the perspectives of doctors, nurses, other health care professionals, medical students, and caregivers.