The Role of Narrative in Medicine
Sayantani DasGupta, a faculty member at Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine, lends her perspective on the importance of narrative in medicinal practice to Creative Nonfiction Magazine in the article “Narrative Medicine, Narrative Humility.” The article is definitely worth a read in full, but below is a particularly poignant excerpt: “Narrative Medicine is the clinical and scholarly movement...
Irish Storytelling: Broad Street Runs Through It
Ireland’s 1976 Tidy Town winner, “Ireland’s Best Kept Town,” casts its Broad Street past thatched-roof cottages. The rural homes of Adare in Limerick County maintain the same thatched style of a century ago (see the pictures below). Gathering wheat straw, reeds, heathers and sedges into thick clumps, the townspeople built their thatched roofs to be resistant to quickly spreading...
Do Stories Benefit Us?
The common sentiment among writers and readers is that stories are good for us, and many would say that we need stories. Tim Parks explores this idea for the New York Review of Books blog. Why do we claim that stories benefit us, or fulfill a need? Is it because they allow us to find ourselves in an...
The Paul Revere of the South
As many of us peruse the work and words of Maya Angelou, we thought it fitting to reflect upon the mentality she spent much of her life fighting against. The article below, from 1961 Alabama, celebrates the Lost Cause of the South in a manner very common to publications before the 1980s, ignoring the issue of...
Sweets on Broad Street
Broad Street in 19th century Norwich, Connecticut, revealed the sweet successes and entrepreneurial grit of African-American and Native-American locals the Peckham family. Below is text from a story by Dale Plummer on African-American entrepreneurship for The Day newspaper in October 1999: An important black-owned family business in Norwich in the mid-1800s was a confectionery and toy store operated on...
