'Harmony' Accepting Submissions

Harmony, a literary journal of essays, short stories, poetry, photography and other visual arts, is a publication of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine Program in Medical Humanities. Students, faculty, and staff of the UA Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health are encouraged to submit original, unpublished work to the journal; however, anyone may submit work. Work on all themes and topics will be considered, especially those related to the world of medical humanities.

Awards will be given in three categories. For complete submission guidelines, please see the Program in Medical Humanities website.

An Invitation from Dr. Ronald Grant

As our current editor Jeanne Feuerstein said in the most recent edition: “Harmony serves many purposes. It may be the prompt required to begin the creative process, or the incentive to just take a step back from your crowded days and inhabit a different space. I suggest that Harmony serves to unite.”

As the director of the Medical Humanities program here at the University of Arizona, I believe that in addition to the above, Harmony serves as a testimonial to our hidden needs to express ourselves – despite medicine’s continued attempts to stifle that much needed and wanted process.

Medical Humanities programs exist not only to nurture these subterranean desires, but to keep us grounded to who we are as human beings: To keep the art in the practice of medicine and the heart in the soul of the practitioner. “More than anything I had done previously in medical school,” Jeanne went on to say, “writing that poem helped me shed my role making me feel more like a human being than a medical student.”

More and more we are discovering students who feel this way, students who all too often lose themselves in the tremendous information overload necessary to become a clinically competent physician.

But is clinical competence all we desire for the people we trust with our lives? A recent data collection showed that the multi-talented and educationally diverse students accepted into Mount Sinai’s medical school actually outperformed their cohorts when measured on a scale of clinical expertise. Despite the fact that their national board scores were slightly below the average (a function, I’m sure, of a background that contained little science), they were able to exhibit superior skill when it counted most – when humanism became just as important as innate intelligence and base of knowledge.

So we welcome your submission to our multi-diverse magazine whose pages are filled with the wonderful art and prose of those whose primary goal is to care for the sick and the infirmed. Unite with us in our pledge to make the practitioner more than an encyclopedia of knowledge. Help us in bringing the art back into the practice of medicine.

Thank you,

Ronald Grant, MD, MFA
Director of Medical Humanities
University of Arizona College of Medicine