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. 



More Podcasts

Book Series

For the first time, a book considers the doctor/patient relationship in the long period and from a broad geographical perspective. Historians, anthropologists and doctors reflect on the factors that, from...

Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity

This volume provides a transcript of the meetings on Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity. The colloquia brought together scholars and experts...

A History of Neurological Surgery at UCSF, 1912-2015:

Over a span of 100 years and five chairmanships, the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco has held a position of renown among academic institutions...

Killing Fever:

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...

Clearing the Air: The Untold Story of the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health
Cover Clearing the Air

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...

Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities

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...

Medical Humanities, Cultural Humility, and Social Justice:
Abstract image of human-like figures in earth tones embracing

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...

Abstract painting of stormy sea with book title and author name

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...

A Rose From Two Gardens: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Images of the End of Life
Front cover of book

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.”...

Women Physician Pioneers of the 1960s: Their Lives and Profession Over a Half Century
Cover Image

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...

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Art & Anatomy: Drawings

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...

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...

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....

Hippocrates Revisited: A Collection of Personal Student Oaths

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...

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,...

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...

Tell Me Again: Poetry and Prose from The Healing Art of Writing, 2012

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...

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....

The Firefly Project: Conversations about what it means to be alive

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...

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...

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.

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....

The Remarkables: Endocrine Abnormalities in Art

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...

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...

Clowns and Jokers Can Heal Us: Comedy and Medicine

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...

The Healing Art of Writing:

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...

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)...

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...

The Supreme Triumph of the Surgeon’s Art: A Narrative History of Endocrine Surgery

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...

Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out

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...