Hospital Drive , an on-line journal that encourages original work that examines themes of health, illness and healing, launched its inaugural issue on July 31 st . Hosted by the University of Virginia School of Medicine, the national on-line journal features poetry, short fiction, personal essay, reviews, photography and visual art (painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media). Submissions are open to anyone in healthcare-allied professions, and issues will be published twice yearly. Hospital Drive may be viewed by clicking here or visiting http://hospitaldrive.med.virginia.edu/ .
“We encourage our students and medical professionals to continue their creative outlets as a healthy complement to their work,” says Editor-in-Chief Dr. Daniel Becker, professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and director of the UVa Center for Biomedical Ethics & Humanities. “With the creation of Hospital Drive , we wanted to give these writers and artists a national forum where their work can be published.”
Becker, who also holds an MFA in creative writing, says Hospital Drive is not just for University of Virginia School of Medicine students, physicians, nurses and other medical personnel, but for the entire national health care community. Becker adds that each year, one of the two issues will be devoted to a specific theme. The theme of Issue 2 is the experience of pain.
Hospital Drive gets its name from an actual road at the University of Virginia. Situated between Thomas Jefferson’s original academic village and the earliest buildings of the School of Medicine, it brings visitors into a community of scholars, teachers, healers, artists and the people they serve.
“Hospitals and clinics generate stories in all kinds of formats: patient histories, student write-ups, attending notes, debriefings, critical incident reviews, consults, patient transfer notes, patient acceptance notes, rushed ‘Can you believe this?’ anecdotes in halls and stairwells, endless e-mails, the occasional eulogy,” says Dr. Sharon Hostler, interim vice president and dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
