A poet's call to bravely inhabit the body.

A daughter shares her father's first responder story about searching for bodies at Ground Zero.

Breathability then and now.

The consequences of undermining mental health needs for the ‘war on terror.’

If I ever make it and they ask me where I’m from, I’ll say MARs: Moving, AIDS, and Religion.

On Music: How music and silence coexist in the mind of an autistic boy.

Whenever the latest woe is me commercial came on hawking the newest painkiller, Mami commanded our attention: “That’s me!”

A two-part inquiry on how ancient philosophy and medicine come up against pollution and modernization in China.

A two part series on how ancient philosophy and medicine come up against pollution and modernization in China

She lost a piece of her brain and will never get it back.

What does a neglected disease tell us about who we choose to take care of and why?

A mother reflects on her grief during her son’s illness, and on her enduring love of reading.

The unlikely bond between a hospice volunteer and a dying Vietnam veteran.

An American pregnancy in Manila.

How a digital media company is challenging stereotypes about the growing landscape of marijuana culture.

The breakthrough addiction medication and the doctors who risk everything to prescribe it.

Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery and the back-to-the-land movement.

Fortified with sock tea, he attends his morning group, which is called Steps. This to distinguish it from the afternoon group, which is called Group.

Obsession as symptom, cause, and cure.

The authors of The Good Death and Five Days at Memorial discuss disaster preparedness, impossible health care choices, and the notion of journalistic objectivity.

An Unnatural Pursuit.

"My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can’t be beat."

Doctors at Bellevue run specialized relief programs for asylum seekers that are survivors of torture.

Boundaries are drawn, and erased, by disease rather than man-made warfare—but no one seems to have noticed.

Reflections 100 years after Typhoid Mary’s quarantine on North Brother Island.

What we don't talk about when we talk about HIV and AIDS.

For a sign language interpreter at a murder trial, the crowning achievement is utter neutrality.

Reconciling a death sentence, from a pediatric cancer ward to death row.

The winning entry of the 2015 Center for Women Writers Prize in Creative Nonfiction

Empathy and immersion in virtual worlds.

How art can provide us with different languages for discussing loss.

A former student remembers the late Oliver Sacks.

Ellis Avery on facing illness.

In a sea of books and media on medicine and illness, too few give voice to the patients.

Purvi Patel's conviction in Indiana sets a dangerous precedent for using feticide laws to persecute women.

A lifelong practitioner has a prescription for medicine.

After her workplace, a Catholic school, dropped contraceptive coverage from the employee health care plan, one teacher came up with a proposal of her own.

Grace Bello talks to Columbia University bioethics professor Dr. Robert Klitzman about the anti-vaccination movement in the U.S. and its potent mix of misinformation, partisan politics, and fear.

After more than a century, Britain’s notorious asylums were slated for closure. Where does that leave the people they actually healed?

A meditation on being eaten.

A journalist and a cardiologist discuss healthcare gone haywire and how Americans are medicating themselves to death.

A mother confronts the waning paternalism of doctors and comes to terms with needing the care of others.

An Army sergeant reflects on his service in Iraq and how his family’s history with PTSD led him to sign up in the first place.

His son’s diagnosis—hypoplastic left heart syndrome—has one father thinking about the reasons to run.

There’s drunk driving, and then there’s hungover driving.

If a humane death is to become a human right, we have to address the socioeconomic barriers that block so many from proper end-of-life care.

I feel the image of myself emerging in his hands, and with every flick and scrape it draws closer to his.

The Southern food historian on the politics of consumption, matzoh ball gumbo, and the multicultural “terroir” of the South.

Guilt was a knot in my grandfather’s stomach, and the decision to leave was a wound that only surfaced when he faded out of this world.

A personal chronical of anorexia and the history of self-starvation.

Her mother’s final death, then, came both hard and as a relief.

'I wanted to talk to veterans and the families of veterans for the same reason that many were telling me I could not talk to them.' An excerpt from Demon Camp.

Dino Buzzati’s masterpiece of sports journalism, an account of the 1949 Giro d’Italia, has been unjustly forgotten.

After losing his companion Peter Hujar to AIDS, artist and activist David Wojnarowicz attempts to film grief while wrestling with his own mortality.

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare obscures the ruling’s other, deeply conservative result: a road-map for gutting Congressional power.

Katie Ryder examines the nature and power of anxiety through the experiences of writer Daniel Smith.

One woman’s choice.

A former examiner of Social Security disability applicants had forty minutes to determine a claimant’s fate.

There was a time when illegal abortion was the only option for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.