AMA Journal of Ethics^®

In this cartoon, a guilt-ridden, heavily scarred surgeon prepares to atone for his team’s failed attempts to save an innocent child victim of a mass shooting.

There’s similarity between processes used by an artist to see the entirety of a scene and those used by a clinician to assess a patient.

Health workers care for COVID-19 patients, just as St Roch tended to bubonic plague victims during the Renaissance. Three artworks relate Roch’s story and apply key insights to the 2020 pandemic.

Some patients’ stories can be hard to tell and hard to listen to, especially in pressured, time-pinched clinical environments.

In 2010, artist Shengxun Lin created Hold Me, a cast resin replica of her own hand as a comfort object and stress reliever. This work continues that practical design theme with a focus on how use and comfort augment aesthetics.

This painting depicts a solitary physician after hours in an empty hospital lobby and is a tribute to such spaces in health care.

In isolation, we are physically apart; in solidarity, we are together. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes our social responsibility to maintain physical distance from one another. In doing so, we solidify our collective strength.

Clinicians have duties to express regard for the breadth and depth of their influence on patients’ pre- and postsurgical self-understandings.

One recent essay suggests that emphasis on social justice in medical education is done at the expense of clinicians’ technical competency. This is a response to that stance.