Visual Poetry Studio
The layout of a poem on the page shapes and limits what it can mean. Arrange a poem yourself in this hands-on exhibit and see how the meaning changes.
Enter the StudioThe Craft of Doctoring
We study the theory and practice of medicine through physician writing, historical archives, digital humanities, and AI-era inquiry.
Rare Medical Books
Historical Archives
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 seven exhibits
A laboratory for medical humanities
Read poems, try a tool, or follow a question about medicine. These exhibits bring together creative experiments, close reading, and resources for studying the craft of doctoring.
What do physicians write about?
Charts trace recurring images, formal habits, and ethical restraint across poems by physicians. They show patterns but do not replace close reading.
Explore data visualizations
What is narrative medicine's parallel chart?
The medical record holds facts and accountability. It often leaves out moral residue and the experience of illness. A parallel chart is a private, reflective text that a clinician writes alongside that record. Whether it is a teaching tool or a working practice is an open question.
See Parallel ChartsFind a poem to read closely
Search historical medical poems by phrase, theme, or clinical situation. Compare writing across languages and periods, then follow a poem back to its source.
Browse poetry
Dickinson-style Poetry Variorum
What changes when a poet chooses another word? We give finished Jindal poems to a language model and compare its likely words with the poet's. Read a summary of the concepts and data.
Read the essay
Directory of medical humanities programs
This directory lists centers, programs, research guides, and people. Follow the links to their sources and find a place to begin your own study.
Open the directory
Design a sequence of poems
Name the feeling you have and the feeling you want. The Poem Sequencer maps a reading path between them through physician poetry. Its exhibit covers the history of reading as part of care.
Enter the Poem Sequencer
Special Collection
Creative Practice: The Jindal 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
the trail turned
then Disappeared
and with it
everything I feared
The Trail Turned · Jenelle JindalRead on the poem page →
Poems are written from the clinic and the classroom, then gathered into reading paths and anthologies for reflection, close study, and teaching.
ReadEnter the archive of poems. Search, filter, and read across themes and time.Explore poems →StudyFollow themes, reading paths, and collections that support reflection and close study.Follow a reading path →TeachBring poems into classrooms, conferences, and workshops to humanize medical learning.Teaching resources →
Studying medicine across eras
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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