Medmic: by healthcare workers

Angelette Pham is a first year medical student at VCU School of Medicine, who started writing poetry in her medical humanities classes in college. She strives to maintain her love for words and medicine as she continues on the path to becoming a physician.

Jane Buell MD is an Otolaryngology resident at the University of Colorado. She enjoys writing poetry to organize her thoughts and emotions tied to tragedies witnessed at work.

Jean Liew MD MS is a rheumatologist and clinical researcher at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center

Tamara Salih is a physician and poet based in the west coast of Canada with her partner and four children. She is interested in how power shapes identity, in speaking about and from marginalization and the interior world of medicine.

Jacquelyn Elise Fitzgerald is a medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, involved in clinical and surgical outcomes research and community-based patient care, with interests in medical humanities and reflective writing.

Biography:
My name is Daniel Rose, MD, and I am a pediatric resident at Emory University in Atlanta, GA whose experiences in medicine continually shape how I understand vulnerability, mortality, and human connection. I began writing poetry in middle school and was drawn to it as a way to express thoughts and emotions freely, without the constraints of formal grammar or structure, a freedom that continues to ground me amid the rigors of clinical life.

As a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fellow on an inpatient unit over the holiday season, I wrote these pieces to capture the quiet ironies, fleeting joys, and subtle rhythms of life in the unit.

Kathy Ray retired in 2024 from 30 years as a PA in the fields of dermatology, cardiology and internal medicine in the Albany, New York area. Patients’ stories often inspired poetry, but it was relegated to sticky notes. Now, words get their due.