Introduction

If there is a web site out there that tries to put law and literature and medicine together in one thought, I haven't found it.  What follows, therefore, is a collection of sites that are about "Law and Literature" or "Medicine and Literature" or related topics.

"Law, Literature & Medicine" is a subset of materials and questions that fall within the broader subjects of "Medicine and Humanities" and "Law and Humanities."  The most visible and developed  topic within these subjects is medical ethics, and I have devoted a separate portion of this web site to Bioethics - Web Resources.  The links below focus upon resources in history, literature, and the arts in general, not on medical ethics.

Please let me know if you know of any sites that should be included here or out-dated links that should be updated or removed.

 

Medical Humanities

There are a handful of excellent Web sites dedicated to Medicine and Humanities.  The best place to start is the NYU School of Medicine's Medical Humanities page.  There you will find the Literature, Arts & Medicine Database, including scores of annotations of literary sources.  The main page also has some useful links.

The Duke Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities has some good on-line resources.  The web site for its April 2004 conference, "Vital Lines, Vital Signs: A Conference on Poetry and Medicine," looks good but is short on resources. Perhaps after the conference they will post some papers.

Recent Dissertations in the Medical Humanities (project of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Health Sciences Library Center)

Medical Humanities (BMJ journal)

The President's Council on Bioethics has a good bookshelf -- currently featuring ten collections -- that includes a broad assortment of readings drawn from "works of history, philosophy, literature and religious meditation."

The Center for Literature, Medicine, and the Health Care Professions

Poetry in Healthcare: from The Poetry Society

Compassion in Dying Federation's "Craft of Empathy" training program

Double Take - Dr. Robert Coles' literary/documentary journal; American Medical News had a good article about the journal and its debt to Bruce Springsteen in its July 21, 2003, edition

Try the website of Mahala Yates Stripling, Ph.D.; she offers some thought-provoking material here.

Undergrad course at Brown described in alumni magazine piece.

A nice series on physician-writers in the British medical journal, The Lancet, including the following pieces (available to nonsubscribers):

See also:  syllabus for "Language, Ethics & Medicine" at Cal-Berkeley

Medical Fiction Writers Seminar 2004 (if this link is broken, try their home page)

 

Society for Literature & Science

This is a membership organization that publishes a journal three times a year and sponsors conferences from time to time.  You can visit the Society's homepage here, and the on-line journal, Configurations, here.

 

Literature & Medicine (journal)

I don't know how long the essays will be available for free, but quite a few selections from recent issues of Literature & Medicine are available at that journal's web site.

 

Law & Literature

The pickings are slim, but there are a few sites that suggest some of the scope of this field:

 

History of Medicine

There are quite a few good sources for materials on the history of medicine.  An interesting site contains thousands of historical images: History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.  The materials are pretty dispersed at U.C.L.A.'s History and Special Collections Division of the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, but it is worth the time it takes to follow the links through their on-line collections.  See also the University of Washington's Department of Medical History and Ethics web site.

 

Poetry

It is amazing how many really good poetry sites have popped up on the Web in the past few years.  Some of the better ones are listed on my Poetry & Art  web resources page.

There are a couple of good ways to search the web for the poetry resources you are looking for: