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2018: Our Year in Review

Dear Doctors Who Create readers,

As 2018 comes to a close, we would like to thank you for supporting our effort to promote a culture and community of creativity in medicine, and share some highlights from this past year:

Last year, one of our resolutions was to start a book review section. Well, one of our readers, Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, messaged me after reading our 2017 year-in-review post to say she was interested, and now we have a thriving book review section edited by Carolyn and Emily Wendell, where we’ve published many reviews of fascinating books at the intersecting of science and art, such as Leonardo’s Brain by Leonard Schlain, In Shock by Rana Awdish, and God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet.

One of our other resolutions/dreams was to plan the first-ever Doctors Who Create conference, and I am excited to share that we will be holding a day-long symposium, “Creativity in Medicine,” on Saturday, April 20, 2019 at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The day at this medical museum will feature panels, workshops, a story slam, a live podcast taping, and more, and we are so excited to officially invite you, our readership, when registration opens in mid-January. Make sure you are signed up for mailing list and/or follow us on twitter and facebook to be the first to know!

And, another resolution we had last year was to finally launch our podcast, which we had been working on since 2016. I am delighted to share that with the help of our two podcast leads, Darlina Liu and Shiv Nadkarni, we have had many great monthly episodes released this year, with more exciting content planned for 2019. Some of our most popular episodes have included an interview with psychiatrist and new University of Pennsylvania “Chief of Wellness” Dr. Benoit Dube, a walk into JeffDESIGN’s medical design “Vault” run by emergency medicine physician and designer Dr. Bon Ku, a conversation about communicating with the public with pediatrician-writer and co-creator of the rotavirus vaccine Dr. Paul Offit, and a podcast about another medical podcast (meta!), sitting down with the team behind the popular internal medicine podcast Core IM. The best way to listen to our podcast is to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Soundcloud.

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We continued to publish works in our Daily Dose section that showcased the spectrum of creativity and empathy in medicine, including poetry and our first-ever fiction piece.

In our Profiles in Creativity section, we published interviews with Dr. Fred Foote, who works on holistic healing in the military, Ian Drummond (a medical student who made a podcast about choosing a specialty), Dr. Kathryn Ko (an ambidextrous neurosurgeon and painter), Dr. Roshan Sethi (radiation oncology resident who is also a screenwriter behind the TV show The Resident), Dr. Anita Raj, a resident who learned to use art as healing when she was a patient, ICU physician Dr. Rana Awdish, who wrote the book “In Shock” about her experience being hospitalized in her own ICU, Dr. Chethan Sarabu, a pediatrician who works on innovation and design in medicine, and Dr. Kit Shaffer, who blends radiology with art.

Thanks as always to our entire team, including our editor-in-chief Stephanie Woo and managing editor Lauren Kim, and the editors and social media managers who work behind the scenes with writers, artists, and their interview subjects to make our content excellent and help this whole operation run smoothly.

As we look ahead to 2019, our biggest resolution and project is going to be the conference in April, and we hope you’ll join us in making it a success!

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Want to help us with the conference or have any ideas for our organization? Please email me at vidya@doctorswhocreate.com

Thanks for making it to the end of the year-in-review post! Tweet us (@doctorscreate) to let us know which piece of 2018 you enjoyed the most, and/or what DWC content you’d like to see in the new year!

Happy New Year!

Vidya

Founder and President, Doctors Who Create