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 medicine in these pages belongs to its time. Later evidence has replaced most of its science. Many of its ethical views are no longer accepted. We read these books to ask what, if anything, connects earlier physicians’ work to ours.
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 often leaves out moral residue and the experience of illness. Whether parallel charts are a teaching tool or a working practice is an open question.
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
One life we have
Do not delay
So live as if it’s
Your last day
Poems are written from the clinic and the classroom, then gathered into reading paths and anthologies for reflection, close study, and teaching.
Medicine has changed many times, in its science and in its ethics, and it will keep changing.
Poet Doctor studies those changes. We read each era, including our own, as evidence of how medicine understood fact and ethics at the time.
We ask what, if anything, connects earlier medicine to medicine today. Some older lessons may remain in what earlier physicians wrote. We recover them to study them, not to revive old practice.
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