Short Wave - How metaphors and stories are integral to science and healing

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

New York's Bellevue Hospital is the oldest public hospital in the country, serving patients from all walks of life. It's also the home of a literary magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, which turns 20 this year. Today on the show, NPR's arts reporter Neda Ulaby tells Emily how one doctor at Bellevue Hospital decided a literary magazine is essential to both science and healing. You can follow Emily on Twitter @EmilyKwong1234 and Neda @UlaBeast. As always, email Short Wave at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hospitals are filled with stories, especially Bellevue Hospital in New York City. It's the oldest public hospital in the U.S., but few know that Bellevue also publishes a celebrated literary magazine. The Bellevue Literary Review turns 20 this year. Happy birthday, dear, Bellevue Literary Magazine. Happy birthday to you. Yeah, we're doing a little art and science today on the show. So, NPR's Netta Ulibe.

Welcome. Hi, Emily. It's so good to have you. And you might be the first arts reporter that we've ever had as a guest on our humble science podcast. Well, as it happens, Emily, I had noticed something of a dearth of arts coverage on my favorite science podcast. Like, my first love was the arts, Netta. And science doesn't always give me a ton of occasion to talk about it. And you're here to revolutionize our show.

Like, what even is a literary magazine at a hospital? You know what? Let's start by revolutionizing your show by listening to a poem that was in the Bellevue Literary in Review. It basically exemplifies the kind of work that it does. Here's poet Thomas Dooley. Okay, for this, listeners, I want you to settle in, sit back and enjoy. My mother's body.

I dreamed your scars first. the silvery gate down your abdomen from where I was lifted. Behind the red spangle over your middle rib lies the threshold to the chambers of holy and feral and the flicker that woke you. I dreamed once I could narrow my eyes as if I could be a scalpel that would incise but not cut you,

a power which startled me. awake, blinking in the warm dark. Oh, listening to poetry or reading poetry is such a physical experience. Do you get this? Like on a cellular level, you just feel a little buzzy or a breathless? That might be a good topic for another short wave. How poetry changes on us on a cellular level. But you know what, Emily, I do. I really think it does. And part of what the Bellevue Literary Review is it's taking poems and it's taking fiction. and nonfiction that specifically looks at who we as humans are through the lens of health,

how we get sick, how we get better, how we take care of each other in both our minds and our bodies. And I think this is the kind of thing that really only could have happened at a very special kind of hospital. And Bellevue is one. And this literary magazine is run by an incredibly special group of writers and doctors working together. I interviewed Dr. Daniel Ophrey, its co-founder, and she was so clear about its mission. Understanding that our bodily function is really the sort of prime basis from which all a writing is coming. If you think about the denial of death and the existential crisis, everything is about outrunning death. And we could boil really any piece of literature down to that. Today on the show, we have something really,

really special. It's all about how one doctor at Bellevue Hospital decided a literary magazine is essential to science and healing. This is Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. So Neda, tell me about Daniel O'Frey, who came up with this idea that medicine needed a literary magazine. Sure. So Dr. Daniel Ophreys worked at Bellevue for a really long time. She's worked there through two epidemics, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and last year in Bellevue's COVID tense. She always wanted to be a doctor, but her stake in storytelling changed when she met her very first patient. And I remember the patient, he had endocarditis, infection of the heart valves, and he needed maybe 10 weeks of IV antibiotics.

And I had to go every single morning, you do his EKHE, listen to his heart, and talk to him. And I got to know this guy so well. And he had all these stories. And I became just fascinated by the stories that patients bring and ended up in primary care where I followed patients for years and years. So when Dr. Ophrey became a professor, because she's also a professor, she started asking her medical students to incorporate the empathy of storytelling into their residences. Okay. Okay, that's pretty cool. How did that go? You know, for medical students today, Dr. Ophrey said it was not exactly intuitive.

Well, at first they were a little bit perplexed because we trained them so stringently in the language of medicine. This is a 57-year-old white female with past medical history of car accidentering disease, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's very hard to switch. And I really had to tell them to drop the jargon, ask the patient, what was it like when your doctor told you that, you know, you have congestive heart? failure or what would you told your doctor to do differently? And it was amazing the things that we learned. So like they learned that people sometimes did not understand their own diagnoses. They'd get confused about terminology, what kind of diseases they had. They would mix up the name of their disease with another disease. And there were sometimes profound miscommunications between people and the caregivers they had at home. So what amounted to failures and storytelling

played a significant role in extending people suffering and possibly even decreasing their lifespans. Wow. I mean, that's some real stakes in how we talk about illness. So how did Danielle go from guiding her students in these discussions with their patients to launching this literary magazine? I know. It doesn't seem like the most obvious step. But the idea was that she wanted to create a destination for writers, not just patients or doctors, but writers from all walks of life that could help normalize and encourage and even valorize storytelling about health and disability and healing. And I think it's really telling that submissions from people in the medical profession went up over the past year during the pandemic. I mean, these people on the front lines really needed to synthesize and talk about what they'd been going through through these kinds of formal narratives. And I should point out, though, as I say that the submissions come from people all over the place. The Journal of Electrax, a lot of well-respected writers, among them, Leslie Jamison, who wrote a gorgeous book called The Recovery, and Celeste Inge, who wrote Little Fires Everywhere, the novel. Oh, yeah, I just, finished Little Fires Everywhere this week. And I found, I mean, Celestine is so good at just getting into

the psychology of her characters. Right. So her very first published story was in the Bellevue Literary Review. And she says the need for something like that journal is very specific and unique. Well, one of the things that I think we're starting to recognize in this cultural moment when we are dealing with, you know, an illness that is taken over the globe is that our health and our mental health and our societal health are all really connected to each other. And as, as a as weird as it sounds to have a literary journal that comes out of a hospital, I wonder if actually that pulls all of those things together. It is a way that we're thinking about what we're thinking, what our health is, bodily speaking, and then also how we connect with each other,

how we function as a society, how we relate to each other as human beings. Oh, absolutely. I mean, we love data on this show, but numbers and terminology only capture so much. And in fact, like day to day, that's not how people think about their lives, right? We don't talk in data points. We talk in narrative. Yeah. And that's what Celestine was saying in that quote. She's talking about seeing literature as part of what holds us fundamentally together just as much as our bones and our blood. So, of course, it's connected to medicine. Neda, I was reading a little bit about the history of the hospital. And a lot of creative people have spent time at Bellevue, like writers Norman Mailer and William S. Burroughs. And

And the jazz musician, Charles Mingus, they all were there. Yeah. Yeah, Charles Mingus was actually on a locked ward for a while with the chess master, Bobby Fisher. And Mingus wrote a jazz piece called Lock Em Up Hillview of Billview. No way. Can we listen to it? Yes. Wow.

Oh, it puts me at such a sense of, like, unease. In its own way, it's as evocative as that poem that we heard right at the start. That's right. Yeah, this is Charles Mingus. I mean, this is very, very evocative. This piece, OK, lock him up. Hellview of Bellevue really tells you what he was feeling in those moments. And, Neda, I mean, there's a lot of art and writing out there, associating creativity and mental illness.

But I'm wondering, as a physician, turned literary editor, what does Dr. Daniel Ophrey have to say about that? Are those associations right? I think Dr. Daniel Ophrey would say that they are right, but it's not just about mental illness. It's about all different kinds of ways in which we are experiencing our bodies and experiencing our mind, both our own and the people that we're taking care of, people who need help. I think that when we're sick or facing illness or caring for someone who's ill, it really taps into this deep existential fear and vulnerability, which I'm convinced is similar to where creativity comes. from. Not that you have to get sick to be creative, but that they are overlapping planes of human existence. And so when we asked for a call for submissions to write about the experience of being ill using poetry, fiction, not just nonfiction, people just send them in.

Wow. She's really bringing some ideas to this story. God, that is so true. That death opens up this well where creativity comes from too. And what makes this magazine so powerful to me, honestly, is that it brings health and mortality and illness and disability, all these things to the forefront, right? It's not like skirting around these topics or hiding them in the shadows. It's actually using literature and art to shine a light on it and help us better stand our relationship to our bodies. I mean, art is a great shame killer. It just like takes the secrecy away and is like, no, let's talk about it. All let's put it all. out there. It's such a good way to put it. It completely reminds us that all of us, every one of us at some

point, we may be disabled if we aren't already. We will be taking care of somebody who is. And just like all of that is a really common human experience that should be centered, so is telling stories about that experience. And Dr. O'Frey told me that literature complements medicine in that way, too. Everyone at some point in their life will face illness. One part of your body or your family's body will falter and we'll all be there at some point. And it's very hard to prepare for that. And there's not a lot of guides out there that speak to the deep inner core about that. So, Emily, this is why medicine needs literature, not as some sort of like fun side thing, but at its very core, literature and medicine should be integrated. And to think about this through the lens of medicine and science,

this magazine, I would postulate, is an experiment. Yeah. And it's an experiment. And it's an experiment. that's working. It's one that's lasted for 20 years. Well, Netta, I am so glad that you brought medicine and mortality to our show, something only an arts reporter can do. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. This episode was produced by Thomas Liu, edited by Sarah Saracen, and fact-checked by Margaret Serrino. The audio engineer for this episode was Neil T-Volt. You're listening to Shortwave, the artsy science podcast. from NPR.