Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Kenneth Iserson No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician.

With the same hands that now hold and annotate my textbooks, I once read and reread my mother’s biopsy results. With those same hands, I helped her rise from her chair when the chemotherapy was too strong, and with those same hands, I now care for my patients. Long before I began my medical training, I had already become familiar with illness and the way it changes the lives of those who stand beside it.

Macie Garner In physician Chloe Nazra Lee’s essay “’I Love You’ in Cantonese,” a psychiatry trainee worries she has failed at interviewing. Instead of correcting her technique, her attending offers unexpected advice: Stop worrying about the checklist and just talk to the patient. Clinical interviews, he suggests, are not only about completion but about making room for connection. In that space, conversation itself can become therapeutic, not only for the patient but also for the clinician.

One time, in the first month or so of medical school, my lab mate and I went into anatomy lab at dusk to review our donor’s back muscles. Unfortunately, we had recently finished dissection of her thorax, so Sarah and I found ourselves tasked with the job of turning her over. We clutched our donor’s frail body to ours, ignoring the moist stains on our plasticky lab gowns, hoping to execute a gentle roll and flip.

Moshe Gordon is a second-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. PerusingIntima‘s last issue, I noticed some overlapping themes between two very different pieces: my own fictional piece “Sweet Dreams,” and “Humor As (Narrative) Medicine,” an autoethnographic study by Alyse Keller Johnson, an associate professor of communication studies at CUNY Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn.

The imagery in Beyond the Threshold by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed, reminds me of my mother when she had Alzheimer’s, of which my story “Mirella”(Fall 2025 Intima) is a fictional portrayal. My mother, displaced in a memory facility, talked often of the homes where she had lived. She got them all confused, but one thing was clear: She wanted to go home. © Beyond the Threshold. Aubrey Reed Spring 2024 Intima. Digital art. My mother had lived mainly in three houses in her life.

Starting from today, move backwards. We’ll see how you became by unspooling, taken back in increments of seven. How many years since you last received a birthday card? Since you’ve stared in your own eyes, flushed in incantation? Can you spell appalled backwards? Let me take some notes: Patient reports unkept and relentless dreams, lymph nodes swollen with unreadable poems. Disorientation to self, especially in bar bathroom mirrors. And are you here right now? In this season that smells like salt?

A reflection on communication by public health scientist and activist Mariana Mcdonald Communication. Open and forthright—what we want as patients and what providers require of us. But that can be difficult, as reflected in my short story “The Vent,” (Intima Fall 2025), where I explore a seriously injured man’s thoughts in the ICU. He complains: “Every time I went in to the clinic, they started asking the exercise question, no matter what I was there for.

When I read the Field Notes essay “Letter to My Oncologist” (Fall 2025 Intima), I was struck by how the writer, psychologist Julia Dobner-Pereira, watches her physician for the smallest fracture of a moment in composure—and how the physician watches her for the same. Their exchanges sit on a narrow ledge—two people trying to hold each other’s fear without admitting how much weight they’re carrying. I recognized that terrain immediately.

Reading Lisa Kingstone’s words in “Angel Lounge, her essay in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, I rediscovered what I had painted in my series “CHEMOod” without yet knowing it: the emotional geography of care, fear and life-saving kindness. © CHEMO-od. Annunziata Tricarico. Acrylic - 7 - “Lonely Always Never” Thanks for reading Intima Journal’s newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.