Abstract

The Program for Medical Humanities at UC–Berkeley recently hosted a small conference composed largely of health professionals and humanities scholars to reflect on "violence in medicine." The topic itself is unsettling: coupling the two words seems at best oxymoronic and at worst darkly suggestive. The conversation ranged from forms of malpractice and exclusion to ways we normalize questionable protocols and treatments. One of the issues that repeatedly arose was the ways in which patients can emerge from clinical encounters and hospital stays feeling violated, sometimes despite the best intentions of care providers.Having looked closely at a good deal of poetry by patients, I decided to bring forward some examples...