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.
The consequences of undermining mental health needs for the ‘war on terror.’
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
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.
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.
The authors of The Good Death and Five Days at Memorial discuss disaster preparedness, impossible health care choices, and the notion of journalistic objectivity.
"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.
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.
The inspiration that comes when facing a terminal 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.
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.
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.
A former examiner of Social Security disability applicants had forty minutes to determine a claimant’s fate.
| It’s July. New York is hot, smelly, and loud. Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium offered some participants a chance for calm, self-reflection. |
| Nothing says “sanctity of life” better than cervical cancer, breast cancer, and HIV! |
| The author of this post asks: why these attacks on an organization whose mission, contained in its very name, is to reduce unplanned pregnancies? How did Planned Parenthood come to be so demonized? |
There was a time when illegal abortion was the only option for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.