Celebrating Students & Humanities in Medicine

On May 1, 2025, the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) Program for Humanities in Medicine (PHM) celebrated the winners of its annual Health Professions Students' Creative Writing & Art Contest. The event highlighted the students’ immense talent and the value of engagement with poetry, prose, and the visual arts to process intense experiences the students encounter during their training and beyond, as well as to express gratitude and joy.

Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and of Medicine Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, MD, delivered opening remarks, standing in for PHM Director Anna Reisman, MD. “Togetherness, and the recognition and sympathy for each other’s humanity is the purpose of today’s ceremony. I want to thank every artist for producing their work that brought us together today.” This year, the contest saw over 120 submissions.

At the gathering, several contest winners presented their work, or a portion of it, and Ostfeld-Johns read poetry and prose on behalf some prize recipients who could not be present. Below, a few of the awardees share insights about their submissions and thoughts about humanities and medicine more broadly.

Food is Medicine (first place (tie), art); Nine Things Just for Me (second place, prose); and Sugaring in Branford (third place (tie), poetry)

Kelly Dunn, who will graduate from the YSM Physician Associate Program in December, shares what inspired her to create Food is Medicine. “When I came back from break on the East Coast, I remember crying while cooking. I was just pulling ingredients from the cabinets—pouring sesame oil into a hot pan, mixing in sauces with labels I couldn’t read, stir-frying something that tasted like home. Food has always been more than fuel in my family. It’s how we care. It’s how my mom says sorry. We always sat down together for dinner, every night. No matter what was going on, we ate—together—and that did something quiet but important.”

Dunn continues, “This was so different from the East Coast, where I’d been admittedly having a hard time. Among many other factors, I’d been eating for efficiency, hitting protein goals, calories, macros, and losing the emotional aspect/rituals surrounding food.” Remembering this, she explains, “made it especially hard to stomach when lecturers told us to counsel patients to avoid fries, hamburgers, and ‘Chinese food,’ as if it were all one monolith of salty, unhealthy takeout. But American Chinese food wasn’t the same as the Asian food I grew up with—and even if it were, it felt reductive to treat entire cuisines as dietary red flags. It felt antithetical to everything I knew: food as medicine, food as memory, food as the language of love.”

Dunn says her impulse to create art—whether poetry, prose, or visual art— “always starts in the same place—when something strikes me as deeply human." For Dunn, expressing that feeling across different mediums "is just more fun than sticking to one, and I like to think each form offers a different kind of experience for the viewer. Visual art feels like a slap to the face—immediate, visceral. Prose lets me slow down, linger in the details, and build entire worlds. Poetry is more fleeting, like a moment you pass through before you even realize it’s changed you.”

Reading Room (first place (tie) art); Haven (second place, art)

Grace Wang, who graduates this month, shares that Reading Room was inspired by the architecture of Yale's libraries that she spent many hours in during medical school, as well as her favorite forest landscapes. “I wanted to create a piece that celebrates a love for learning, and the necessity of open-minded experiential learning as much in medicine as in exploring natural landscapes.” Her other work, Haven, started out as a sketch she made in between coffeeshop chats with medical school classmates during the pre-graduation Capstone Course. Wang says, “I wanted to dedicate it to all the beautiful friendships I've made through medical school in New Haven.”

Wang describes how creating art has taught her to be a better observer, which has been such a big part of learning to be a good doctor. “You can learn so much about a patient at their bedside based on their physical exam, but also their posture, the personal affects around the room, and what is on their food tray.” She adds that she was “so fortunate” to be mentored by Andre Sofair, MD, MPH, professor of medicine (general medicine) and of epidemiology of microbial diseases, and Stephen Holt, MD, MS, associate professor of medicine (general medicine), during her internal medicine sub-internship, both of whom, she says, “actively incorporate intentional observation into discussions of optimizing care for patients based on individual needs.” Art also grounds Wang, who thinks, “it's important for everyone in medicine to have passions outside the hospital that help you take care of your own emotional well-being.”

After she graduates, Wang “definitely” plans to continue creating art. “I really enjoy capturing new experiences and places through watercolor sketches, mostly when I am outdoors,” she says, “but I'm sure my pieces will also reflect all that I learn in residency about medicine, my patients, and myself.”

Black (white) Coat (honorable mention, prose)

Morgan Brinker describes how it felt like she had been writing Black (white) Coat on and off since the second half of her clerkship year. “It started as a few broken phrases and lines that I had strung together as I reflected on my time in the hospital, but never had the energy to do more as writing about these events was emotionally traumatizing and draining for me.” Black (white) Coat then coalesced into a solid piece of writing as Brinker was studying for STEP 1. “Because I had taken some time to more completely process my experiences on the wards, I felt that I was in a better space to write and actually had finalized the piece two-to-three days before sitting for the exam, which was a welcomed distraction."

Reflecting more generally on writing during medical school, Brinker explains, "Writing has always felt more natural to me in terms of how I perceive the world around me. Through the MD program, I have had the opportunity to care for different patients and hear their stories—some of which have personally affected me. The reflective writing sessions throughout clerkships were protected times to process my experiences on the wards, and it speaks highly of YSM that these sessions are a part of our curriculum."

Brinker is appreciative of other PHM initiatives. “I have attended a few of the events over the past year or so, which I credit to keeping my humanities side alive, as the only writing I felt that I have done during medical school are history & physical exams and progress notes.” Additionally, Brinker, who had mostly written short fictional stories during high school and college for creative writing courses, credits PHM for encouraging her to try prose.

Blood is on me (third place (tie), poetry)

Katie Parker shares that the inspiration behind Blood is on me was the death of her father, who she found after he suffered a massive heart attack. “My sister and I did everything we knew as health care clinicians to save him, but he was unable to be revived despite best efforts. Poetry has been very helpful in the healing journey from such grief and trauma.”

Parker, who lives in Adairsville, Georgia, about one hour north of Atlanta, says poetry has been beneficial more generally throughout her time in the Physician Assistant Online Program. She shares that because of the isolation that comes with an online program, “it is easy to feel behind, lost, and lonely. I'll admit there's opportunities where imposter syndrome definitely rears its head.” Writing, she explains “helps to clear my mind of those thoughts, and paper tends to act as a trusted friend and confident for such feelings.”

Birds (second place, poetry)

Alina Martel wrote Birds on an early January morning when, home in Minnesota on winter break from college and studying for the MCAT, she could hear birds chirping through the window. “Life was returning to the landscape, and I reflected on how I had changed.” Martel shares. “Most of my college years were plagued by unyielding anxiety. It limited where I went, what I did, and who I was. I lost myself. Only after I was diagnosed and treated for my anxiety disorder and OCD did my world open up again.” She continues, “When I wrote Birds, I still had a long way to go, but I recognized that my progress meant something. I wanted to evoke a hope for something better—and acceptance for who we are.”

Martel says she jokes that the happier she is, the less poetry she writes. “The truth of the matter is, I often find sadness more evocative than happiness,” adding that her “mostly positive experiences in the MD Program have inspired several poems.” Her favorite poem is machine, which “reflects on medicine as the ultimate form of embracing my fears to pursue what I love.”

Reflecting more generally on engaging in the arts during medical school, Martel says "there can be a lot of pressure to devote as much time as possible to studying, research, volunteering, etc. Those things are all important, but it’s also important to hold onto those parts of yourself that bring inherent joy.”

The PHM contest began over twenty years ago, originally as a poetry and prose contest for medical students, when the family of Marguerite Rush Lerner, MD, established and endowed it to honor her. Lerner was a dermatologist at the medical school and a children’s book author. Her husband, Aaron Lerner, MD, PhD, was the first chair of Yale’s Department of Dermatology, and two of their four sons, Ethan Lerner, MD, PhD ‘82 and Michael Lerner, MD ’81, attended YSM. The contest has since expanded to include visual arts, and students from across the health profession schools and programs—MD, MD-PhD, Physician Associate, Physician Assistant Online, Nursing, and Public Health. MD student winners receive the Marguerite Rush-Lerner prize; the other Yale health professions students receive the Program for Humanities in Medicine prize.

In announcing the contest winners, Ostfeld-Johns thanked PHM Manager Karen Kolb for her “outstanding work” on the contest, as well as the contest judges, who this year for the first time included two members from the Yale School of Nursing. The judges were: Aba Black, Terry Dagradi, JoAnne Wilcox, Mary Pendergast, Sarah Cross, Lorence Gutterman, Melissa Grafe, Randi Hutter-Epstein, Kenneth Morford, Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, Vincent Quagliarello, Nora Segar, Nicole Langan Maciejak, Ophelia Empleo-Frazier, Lacey Jones, Ash Alpert, and Cynthia McNamara.