Welcome! In 2022 the University of California Medical Humanities Press was renamed the University of California Health Humanities Press. This change reflects our commitment to represent and promote creative and academic writing among broader health care communities, including patients, practitioners, and scholars, engaged with the human experience of health and illness. We welcome creative writing (fiction, poetry, artistic) as well as non-fiction (history, social science, ethics) contributions that explore the broad fields of health care, science, and technology.
Digital Magazines
Book Series
Andy Warwick
Killing Fever is a new kind of book – an historical thriller that’s also an historical thrill. Historian and novelist Andy Warwick uses a mysterious death and wrongful arrest in...
By Charles A. LeMaistre, MD; Donald R. Shopland, Sr.; Emmanuel Farber, MD, PhD; Eugene H. Guthrie, MD; Peter V.V. Hamill, MD
The release of the1964 Report on Smoking and Health was a true watershed event in public health. The New York Public Library has called the report one of the most...
Edited by Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan
What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening...
Edited by Dalia Magaña, Christina Lux, and Ignacio López-Calvo
Treating patients more humanely starts with promoting cultural competence and cultural humility. These concepts are critical to enhancing the medical experience for underserved communities and rebuilding their trust (confianza) in...
Wendy Patrice Williams
Operated on as an infant, without anesthesia, Wendy P. Williams began life at war with her body. There were tubes everywhere, in and out of every opening, her mother reminded...
Marcia Brennan, with Illustrations by Lyn Smallwood
Intriguing parallels arise between contemporary end of life images and themes expressed historically in the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, the Catholic saint who is known as the “Little Flower.”...
By Susan Detweiler, M.D., with Lillian Cartwright, Ph.D.
Female physicians were nearly invisible in the United States of the mid-1960s. The motivation and character of women who aspired to become physicians had never been the subject of serious...
Arthur J. Ammann, Shan-Estelle Brown, Paul Burnett, Elizabeth Alice Clement, Lynne Gerber, Polina Ilieva, Jay A. Levy, Paul Volberding
In the fall of 2019 the UCSF Archives & Special Collections, with the support of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, organized an interdisciplinary symposium Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS...
Using the tools of book history, media studies, and literary theory, Fixing Women examines the construction of a masculinist professional selfhood in male-authored midwifery textbooks during the long eighteenth-century. Ordinary...
Edited by Richard M. Ratzan
Imagining Vesalius is a collection of ekphrastic works - poetry, prose, watercolors and sculpture - celebrating De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the 1543 landmark anatomical atlas by Andreas Vesalius. Using the...
Edited by John N. Forrest, Jr. and Lewis Landsberg
This book contains descriptions of 22 persons, professors of medicine, many of them trained by Beeson, who write about their recollections of Paul Beeson. The book follows Beeson’s life, from...
Albert Howard Carter, III
All of us live between peril and safety, danger and security, sickness and wellness, death and life. The threats range from a head cold to the Climate Change that endangers...
Josephine Ensign
A winner of the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the American Journal of Nursing, Soul Stories is an exploration of the boundaries of narrative within health and healing...
Edited by Laura Ferguson and Katie Grogan. Foreword by Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD
On Tuesday evenings at NYU School of Medicine, art supplies are set out on tables and the anatomy lab is transformed into a studio, with a great spirit of creative...
Henry R. Bourne and Eric B. Vermillion
Threatened by sharp cuts in state government support and stagnant federal research funding, US public research universities are becoming fragile ecosystems. By charting flows of research dollars through a leading...
Edited by Brian Dolan
This reader reprints critical essays published over the course of a 100-year history that grapple with the challenges of defining and justifying the presence of humanities instruction in medical education....
Edited by Jo Marie Reilly, Helena Yu, Allan S. Lichtman, Rosemary R. Lichtman
Each fall, first year medical students recite the traditional Hippocratic Oath, a promise of their commitment to the field of medicine. This ritual serves to highlight their acceptance of the...
Edited by Sharon Dobie, MD
Do your doctors share what they have learned from you? Likely not! With little precedent for physicians to open up about the impact their patients have on their personal development,...
Silvia Camporesi
What is it to talk about gene transfer, gene therapy, and gene doping? Is choosing deafness with preimplantation genetic diagnosis an ethical way to carry on a cultural bloodline? What...
Edited by Joan Baranow, PhD and David Watts, MD
For more than a decade The Healing Art of Writing conference has sought to strengthen compassionate understanding between healthcare providers and those who seek a state of well-being beyond the...
Mahala Yates Stripling
Many of the bioethical and medical issues challenging society today have been anticipated and addressed in literature ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Albert Camus’s The Plague, to Margaret Edson's Wit....
Cynthia D. Perlis, Editor, with Foreword by Brian Dolan, PhD
The Firefly Project: Conversations about what it means to be alive presents true dialogues about living and dying, hopes and dreams, grief and loss. These stories show human beings connecting...
By Edison Miyawaki
What to Read on Love, not Sex examines Sigmund Freud’s career-long reliance on tragedy, myth, scripture, and art to articulate a psychology of love. The author, a neurologist and psychiatrist...
Eds. Paul Blanc, MD, and Brian Dolan, PhD
Collection of keynote addresses and abstracts of papers presented at the international conference in San Francisco, CA, in 2010. Accompanying PowerPoint images for Robert Proctor's keynote.
By Dorothy Porter, PhD
Delves into the tangled strands of social forces that have linked theory and practice in social medicine and examines their impact on changing the principles and directions of public health....
By Carol Z. Clark and Orlo H. Clark, MD
Looks at the intersections between medicine and art throughout history, examining paintings that demonstrate the artist's skill of observation manifest in accurate representations of endocrine disease. This book is out...
By Henry R. Bourne
In less than a decade, scientists located within 200 yards of one another identified the first cancer genes, discovered that a protein by itself can transmit an infectious disease, learned...
By Albert Howard Carter III, PhD
Presents and analyzes humor on medical topics inside and outside the hospital. Carter argues that comedy can be a form of preventive medicine and should routinely be an adjunct to...
Eds. Joan Baranow, PhD, Brian Dolan, PhD, and David Watts, MD
This volume brings together the voices of caregivers and patients who share a passion for writing about the mysterious forces of illness and recovery. A belief shared among all contributors...
Edited by Nancy J. Burke, PhD
This collection of essays challenges static and binary discourses regarding the Cuban healthcare system, bringing together papers that paint a nuanced and dynamic picture of the intricacies of Cuban health(care)...
By Stewart Justman
How is it that people in search of healing were at one time able to experience the therapeutic effects of “animal magnetism”? The evidence suggests that those who went in...
Eds. Martha A. Zeiger, MD, Wen T. Shen, MD, MA, Erin A. Felger, MD
Endocrine surgery – the subspecialty of general surgery involving diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands as well as the endocrine pancreas – is a rapidly growing field of...
By. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt...