At the request of her faculty colleague Dorothy Lander, Leona English introduced Carol Flegg for the launch of her book RN: Resilient Nurses – Frontline Stories from the COVID Pandemic, published with HARP The People’s Press on June 13, 2026. Leona knows Carol well as a graduate student in the Master of Adult Education program […]
St. Bartholomew’s Hospital By John Graham-Pole, MBBS, MD I wrap my skimpy white coat about me, shivering under the January snowfall as I cross Barts Square heading for the Med-Surg block. Whose idea was it for doctors to don white coats in January, anyway? Is it to give us an air of spotless sterility? Hardly […]
by John Graham-Pole Wellcome Collection Gallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0028932.html It’s the very first day of January 1967. My first internal medicine internship begins this frosty Monday morning under the shades of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the city of London. Right now it’s 7:46 AM and I’m making my familiar way from the medical college across West Smithfield […]
by John Graham-Pole I’ve been reflecting on words I rarely heard during my fifty-plus years of medical practice. Words I was especially drawn to in later years, when making rounds, when writing chart notes, especially when listening and responding to my patients and their families. These are some of the words I’m thinking of: purpose, […]
By John Graham-Pole For more than three decades, the University of Florida’s Arts in Medicine program (AIM: artsinmedicine.ufhealth.org) has brought visual, literary, and performance artists into the hospital’s wards and clinics. Its mission has been simply to enrich the experience of patients and caregivers through countless forms of creative expression. When my nurse colleague […]
Only rarely do we get to learn where our shadow falls. Here is one of those instances. Dr. John Graham-Pole, pioneer in bone marrow transplants for children and the arts-in-medicine movement, received this surprise email from a patient 38 years on…
On Jan. 11, 2025, Cathy Hassels Monning of Amsterdam, posted on LinkedIn Example2 of 25 in a series of powerful examples of arts and health to start the new year.Example 2 refers to the attending physician for a patient who has sickle cell disease,and to Jill Sonke, former artist-in-residence at University of Florida, Centre for […]
If children being treated for cancer can give themselves a boost of healing humour, then let’s all of us follow their example.
Sally MacKay’s heartfelt, courageous, and often humorous book traces her life as a young girl stricken with poliomyelitis in the late 1940s, before the availability of immunization. Sally speaks of her almost lifelong affliction with polio as being both an adversary and a companion, which defined her life path and molded her character. A life […]
Aboriginal Rock Mural Kimberley Region, Western Australia Posted by John Graham-Pole I don’t have answers to any of these questions, but I can tell you a story. It’s 1960, and I’m entering St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School in the city of London on a quite unlooked for scholarship in Classical languages. It’s true I’ve been […]
