"The Doctor's Art" is a weekly podcast that explores what makes medicine meaningful, featuring profiles and stories from clinicians, patients, educators, leaders, and others working in healthcare. Listen and subscribe/follow on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Podchaser.
Storytelling is the oldest medical technology -- so claims this week's guest, Laurel Braitman, PhD, an acclaimed author and Writer-in-Residence at Stanford School of Medicine. Laurel offers a uniquely qualified perspective on the matter, having grown up in a medical family and now mentoring clinicians everywhere to help them fulfill their writing goals. She received her doctorate in history and anthropology of science from MIT, and her most recent work is the 2023 memoir titled What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love.
Over the course of her conversation with Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson, MD, Laurel talks about the challenges she has faced on her journey as an author, how creative writing can lead to better doctoring, and how we can find the courage to discover our own identities in the face of expectations others have for us.
In this episode, you will hear about:
- 2:06 What it means to be Writer-in-Residence at Stanford School of Medicine
- 6:42 Why physicians write and how storytelling can help clinicians
- 14:43 How Laurel's writing career began and her advice on how to break into the writing world
- 23:15 What it's like to be in the medical field as an "embedded outsider"
- 28:15 Laurel's most recent book What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, which details her experience of growing up with parents with high expectations and struggling through the grief of her father's death
- 36:54 The importance of carving out time to reflect on your journey and your "why" in the medical profession
- 44:55 Laurel's advice for healthcare professionals who want to take the first step towards writing
The following is a partial transcript (note errors are possible):
Bair: So Tyler and I know you primarily as the Writer-in-Residence at Stanford Medicine. So let's start with that to set the stage. Can you share with us what exactly do you do in this position and how did you first become involved with this work?
Braitman: Oh, it's such a weird story. And that, you know, I actually think it's one of the braver things I've ever done, which is kind of waltz in to the bioethics center and ask for a job. I didn't even do it over email.
What happened was that I thought that I was going to be writing a very different kind of book and I wanted to write about if physicians and other healthcare professionals who saw the end of life up close and personal, day in and day out, if they would make different decisions for themselves when it came to their end-of-life planning and choices.
So I came to Stanford thinking I was reporting that book. I wanted to skulk about a hospital and do interviews and spend time with clinical students and faculty. That's how I appeared. And then what happened was that I started asking around. People were so kind to me, I wondered if I might be of help, if I could trade, as it were, some of my expertise or experience for some of the access I was getting to people's really heartfelt opinions about end-of-life medicine and difficult choices they either thought they may make one day or had made recently. So. So that's how I appeared.
And the amazing, wonderful doctor Audrey Shafer, who I know you've also spoken to, she really rolled out the welcome mat for me and she invited me to co-teach a class for creative writing for medical students that she had been teaching for years and told me about Medicine and the Muse, the Program for Medical Humanities, Arts and Medical Humanities at Stanford. So it was Audrey and then also David Magnus at the Center for Bioethics, who really welcomed me and didn't think it was weird at all, the idea of having a writer around.
Bair: We have also interviewed Dr. Magnus on the show. For those of our listeners who don't know, Dr. Audrey Shafer is the founder of the Medical Humanities program at Stanford Medicine. So what do you currently do in this position, though? Like, I know that you mentor a lot of physicians who are interested in writing, but what kinds of programs, activities do you do and what kinds of mentorship do you provide to doctors?
Braitman: It changes almost on a daily basis depending on what the needs are. So when I first started out, I did about 3 hours a week at Stanford. I didn't know if anyone truly would be interested in creative writing and what that might look like. Being a writer in a medical school is an odd thing. When I tell people about it, they think I'm writing medical things for the medical school, and then I have to sort of walk it back and explain, no, that's not what I do.
I work with clinical students, so PA students and medical students and then lots of faculty, so physicians, but not exclusively physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, anyone who does anything. At Stanford Medicine, I consider it part of my purview and I help them achieve their communication dreams. Sometimes that's working with a graduating clinical student to help them write a better fellowship essay. I do a lot of that. Interview coaching. Helping people figure out how to best present their research at an academic meeting in a way that isn't going to just cause other people to fall asleep. How to do better PowerPoint presentations that are not just like the scourge of academic medicine, where everything is like tiny font and completely illegible and dense.
For the full transcript, visit The Doctor's Art.
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