We study the theory and practice of medicine through physician writing, historical archives, digital humanities, and AI-era inquiry.
Rare Medical Books
Rare medical books, many never before translated into English, read alongside their original pages. Free to everyone.
The science in these pages is long outdated. What has not changed is the physician’s situation: uncertainty, suffering, the wish to help, and the question of what a good doctor owes a patient. Reading how earlier physicians wrote about that situation is a way of thinking about our own.
Enter LibraryMedical Craft in Three Exhibits
These three pages are studies of the craft of medicine from different humanities angles — the form of a poem, the patterns across a corpus of physician-authored poetry, and the limitations of the official chart.
Visual poetry makes form visible. The exam room, the chart, and the discharge summary are forms too. This studio is a small laboratory for studying how arrangement becomes interpretation, in a poem and in an encounter.
Enter the StudioDigital humanities methods help us trace recurring images, formal habits, and ethical restraint across physician-authored poems. They show patterns without replacing the slow, attentive work of close reading.
Explore the CorpusThe medical record holds facts and accountability. It does not hold moral residue and the fullness of the human condition. Whether parallel charts are a pedagogical tool or a practical technique is a question worth keeping open.
See Parallel ChartsSpecial Collection
The Jindal Collection is an applied creative counterpart to our theory-focused work — an evolving corpus of poems generated in, with, and for the practice of medicine and medical humanities.
Featured poem
Where does
the river go?
Poems are written from the clinic and the classroom, then gathered into reading paths and anthologies for reflection, close study, and teaching.
Medicine has always changed.
Its future depends not only on new technologies, but also on understanding the traditions, practices, and values that shape the profession.
Poet Doctor brings together medical humanities, physician writing, historical archives, digital methods, and AI-era inquiry to study how medicine understands itself — and how doctoring may continue to evolve.
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