The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Initially established by physician-writer Abraham Verghese as a one-off event, the workshop has gained prominence within the School of Medicine for training new doctors across specialties to hone the craft of writing.

“We teach medicine as stories,” said Lisa Sanders, the co-director of the workshop and a professor at the School of Medicine. “It’s not like medicine is just science. It’s always about that intersection between human beings, sickness or death, and science. And if you just focus on the science, you’re missing a lot.”

The Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop is open to all medical residents at Yale’s internal medicine department and other fields, including psychiatry, surgery and emergency medicine. A few months before the workshop, residents submit a 1200 maximum creative or personal essay as part of their application, said Anna Reisman, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and the co-director of the program.

Selected participants bring those pieces to a two-day workshop where they refine and revise each others’ pieces. The residents also learn writing techniques under the guidance of the program directors, who themselves are physician-writers and creatives. Reisman is also co-director of the program for humanities in medicine, and Sanders created and authors the New York Times Magazine’s “Diagnosis” column — the inspiration for the television show House M.D.

At the end of the program, the writers read aloud their final pieces to students and faculty. Their essays are published in an online zine titled “Capsules.”

“The objective really is for us to teach the craft of writing,” said Reisman. “We teach residents who take part to learn some of the elements of writing, learn how to tell a story and learn how to write a personal essay. We talk about good verbs, writing with precision, all the basic craft lessons, and we spend time doing some writing exercises.”

This experience has proved integral for residents like Effie Johnson, a workshop participant and editor for “Capsules,” who felt tentative about her writing abilities as a medical student.

“I had a lot of impostor syndrome,” said Johnson. “The opportunity to just talk about writing, get feedback on my writing, and have the opportunity to grow is something that really attracted me. Writing is part of the way that we can solidify what is important to us, using it as motivation, especially those emotional experiences.”

Justin Dower, another resident who participated in the program, said he was also excited at the prospect of working with the workshop leaders and the other participants. Learning about the diversity of experiences that each of the new doctors wrote about, he added, was informative.

As a healthcare provider, Dower said he also believes that studying the medical humanities has improved his ability to connect with his patients.

“The humanities gives us a way to get better … by studying the experiences of writers in the past, writers in the present, learning from patients, and also other practitioners,” Dower said. “By reading what they have written, we can really get a better understanding of how to meet the people that we’re trying to serve and how to connect with them.”

The News interviewed several additional participants in the workshops, many of whom spoke about how the workshops helped them reflect on their experiences as physicians and healthcare providers. 

Morgan Goheen, an infectious diseases fellow in the School of Medicine’s division of infectious diseases who participated in the workshop, said she plans to spend most of her time as a physician-scientist in the lab. As an academic researcher, she said she hopes that improving her writing will allow her to communicate her research more effectively.

Writing has also been a tool to better connect and communicate with her patients, Goheen added. 

“It’s a way to express and appreciate what lies before me, whether it’s an individual patient or discussion of a global disease burden like malaria,” said Goheen. “Having the skills to notice and appreciate things that are affecting my day-to-day work has been an important part of letting me process and be better at working with people that are really different from me.”

Not every writer’s piece in the workshop centered around medicine. Caroline Raymond-King, for instance, wrote about her partner, their chickens and their dog.

“It’s hard in residency, but when you have a story to tell, it’s nice to have the skills to be able to write it,” Raymond-King said. “Writing really gives me the space and time to think about what I really care about.”

That space to reflect has been critical for some of the participants to reflect on challenging experiences they’ve encountered during their medical training, several told the News. In her piece for the workshop, Lara Rotter wrote about her experience treating a victim of domestic violence while still in medical school. 

Rotter said she believes that many people in the medical field harbor stigma around experiencing hardship during clinical practice. Doctors, she said, are often expected to remain emotionally unperturbed, even when encountering traumatic cases like domestic violence and abuse. 

“In medicine, we often fall into the trap of connecting professionalism with being unemotional and not encountering any difficult situations,” she said. “Often when difficult situations are encountered, we think this means we are too vulnerable or not perfect enough.” 

But through her writing, Rotter said she hopes to open up about doctors’ emotional and mental well-being as they navigate challenging patient experiences.

“We just really want to share stories to normalize things that are happening, that we all experience these things, and that we all have these difficult encounters with patients,” said Rotter.

For Matthew Morrison, an emergency medicine physician in New York City and a lecturer of medical humanities at Yale College, the quality of a physician’s writing might not even matter. Rather, he said he believes that having a creative outlet is a necessity for doctors.

“Doctors, who are occasionally ourselves human, need artistic and creative outlets for what we experience,” Morrison wrote in an email to the News. “The vast majority of us will write abominable poetry, and that is perfectly fine. But we need to remember that we are entitled to our experiences. Only a human — and not an algorithm, not a computer, not an LLM — can see the gestalt.”

The Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop was established in 2003.

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With the cacophonous chatter of climate crises, energy disparities and ecological challenges, the study of environmental humanities aims to bring a humanistic touch to science. 

Hosted in the Humanities Quadrangle on Wednesday, the Yale Environmental Humanities program’s “Welcome Back Panel” featured presentations by Maria Trumpler GRD ’92, professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, and graduate students Kevin Yang ARC ’24 and Charlotte Hecht GRD ’24. This panel focused on three microhistories unfolding in the midst of humanity’s consideration of the environmental sciences. 

Paul Sabin, professor of history and American studies and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities program, expressed his gratitude for those who came to support the event before turning over to the first presenter. 

“We live in a social world and sometimes there is an impulse to reduce it to technology and economics and law, but then we have to remember that we’re human actors making choices and making these choices because of ideas and beliefs and relationships,” Sabin said. “In order to understand those things, we need the humanities, and that includes various aspects of culture that help us think about what we imagined to be the right ways to live and what the proper relationship is to the environments around us.” 

Trumpler, who received a doctorate in history of medicine and life science from Yale, has been a member of the University community since 1983. 

Now a senior lecturer in the department of women, gender and sexuality studies, many of Trumpler’s academic interests concern the historical imprint of women in science and technology. 

In Trumpler’s presentation “Handweaving, Fibersheds, and Environmental Education,” she discussed that understanding “how women engaged with things in the past” can help inform our conception of women’s lives today. 

“So for example, some people think the life of a 19th century farm woman in New England must have been constant drudgery,” Trumpler explained in her presentation. “But if you actually go back and start engaging with the tools, engaging with the irons, engaging with the fabrics, engaging with the life as much as you can, you actually see that they handled objects that are very beautiful and very sensual.”

Taking time off from the academic setting of Yale, Trumpler explored a hands-on approach to better comprehend the daily activities of 17th-century New England women in her research. Aided by grants through the Environmental Humanities program and Whitney Humanities Center, she journeyed to Vermont to make cheese, bread and clothing as early American women once did. 

Explaining that history helps people in the present to make sense of progress and current values, she chronicled some of her daily activities, including the process of spinning her own wool and making a blanket, tasks she undertook for eight hours a day. 

With this newfound insight, Trumpler said she has turned her attention to fibersheds, traditional areas in New England that were once responsible for clothing all the members of a particular community with wool and linen. 

She now dedicates her extra time to trying to convince people, and in particular, women, to be more conscious with their clothing decisions, whether that includes mending or even creating new pieces to wear from the offerings of fibersheds. In spite of her efforts, Trumpler said she has found the task to be more difficult than expected, as she noted that modern women “love the number of clothes they have in their closet.”

Regardless, Trumpler remains optimistic in her findings. 

“There’s a sense of empowerment of sensual pleasure accomplishment,” Trumpler said. “I made a blanket entirely myself from this fleece, And so I think it illuminates aspects of daily life in the past that we tend to brush over.”

Kevin Yang next discussed the details of his project, titled “New Haven, Revisited,” which he conducted with fellow architecture student Fany Kuzmova ARC ’24, with funding from the Environmental Humanities program. Inspired by the School of Architecture’s Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, an assignment that, according to the project website, “allows professional degree students the unique chance to design and build a structure as part of their graduate education,” Yang and Kuzmova joined forces to address community development issues in New Haven.

Interested in urban renewal from the experiences of residents, the project partnered with a local high school to develop a three-part workshop on development issues, oral histories and a photo exposition, forming a “combined anthology” to represent New Haven, particularly in relation to Yale initiatives. 

The two hope to provide two deliverables with the culmination of the project, the first being a “guidebook,” or more of an architectural publication, as Yang explained, where they introduce the history of community spaces and the factors that helped support their successes. Yang and Kuzmova said they also intend to bring about an exhibition of the work they collected throughout the workshops.

Finally, Hecht presented the enlightenment she gained through reading the memoirs passed on by her great-grandfather, U.S. Navy Captain Bert F. Brown. A graduate student in American studies, Hecht is completing her dissertation, which sprung from the implications of the United States’ history of nuclear testing in different locations, including Nevada and the Marshall Islands, throughout the Cold War, and focuses more broadly on the U.S. nuclear industry. Little did she know that her own family tree also contained a surprising connection to nuclear testing.

Paging through her great-grandfather’s memoirs, she learned he was involved in nuclear tests. 

“This felt like a really crazy coincidence to me,” Hecht said. “It wasn’t something I knew about, I had no idea, and it really stuck with me as something I wanted to think about and explore, because here I was writing this dissertation about the environmental destruction, the social impacts of nuclear testing.”

As she detailed in her presentation “Unhomelike,” Hecht said she aimed to reconcile with her revelation through the humanities and a fund from the Environmental Humanities program and investigate “long legacies of brief action.” Mediating history through a personal lens, Hecht displayed images she felt were relevant to her grandfather’s story, including one of him alongside other officers and an image she took when in Utah, visiting the locations he once experienced. 

Both photographs had a distinctive blue tint, the product of cyanotype printing that she taught herself to conduct within her own home. Hecht informed the News that the pigment in the printing, Prussian Blue, when presented in the form of pills, serves as a treatment for radiation poisoning. She added that the medium she used was a gesture to the “violent history” her great-grandfather was involved in.

After the presenters concluded, the crowd adjourned for refreshments and chatter, launching into a discussion of broader issues. 

Lav Kanoi GRD ’24, the program’s graduate coordinator, told the News that there are numerous questions with strong social value, with underlying “philosophical impulses”. 

“How does one bring equity issues to alternative energy? In a sense, does the burden of environmental pollution again fall on poorer people, or poorer countries and so on and so forth? Questions like that are not really addressed from a technological perspective,” Kanoi said.  “Even in technological circles, what does one do with the new kinds of wastes that are produced as we shift to alternative energy forms and such?”

In addition to his role as graduate coordinator, Kanoi has been a graduate student at Yale since fall of 2018, studying anthropology in a joint program through the anthropology department and the School of Environment. 

Citing the creation of the Environmental Humanities program in 2017 as a contributing factor in his choice to join the Yale community, he noted the importance of adding humanistic perspectives to the environmental sciences. 

“What is my relationship to another human being to another animal to another life form? That relationship predicates so much about what I do in that interaction,” Kanoi said. “Do I cut down a tree? To do something that was planned in its place to use a part of it in so many different ways? Simplistically speaking, the Environmental Humanities allows us without a market compulsion to investigate these questions, to think freely.”

Kanoi said he hopes to see more students revel in the many coming events to be offered by the program, as detailed on their active calendar. 

Sabin later reiterated that the program, which serves as an umbrella for a number of other associated endeavors such as the Environmental Film Festival and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, welcomes all interested students.

“Environmental Humanities is broadly open to anyone who’s interested in thinking about the intersection between humanities and the environment,” Sabin said “Think about questions of culture, social, social questions, ethics, ethical questions. Those can enrich any other fields of study that people might have. So you don’t have to be in the humanities, but rather think about the relationship of the work that you do to these broader humanistic contexts.”

The Environmental Humanities program is open to all members of the Yale community and now offers a graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities.

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