Twenty-five years ago, Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, a primary care internist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and a few of her fellow doctors there decided to start a health-focused creative writing journal, Bellevue Literary Review (BLR). Back then, “there was lots of writing about health but not a lot about vulnerability, about when the body mutinies on you,” recalled Ofri, also a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City and BLR’s executive director and editor in chief. “Creative writing and creativity are a place to grapple with those shared vulnerabilities that the larger health publishing industry does not address.”

When the doctors ran three small ads in writing magazines asking for submissions, they didn’t expect much of a response. But hundreds of poems and works of fiction and nonfiction on health, illness, and healing flooded in. To launch the magazine, the doctors planned a gala reading event for October 7, 2001. Then 9/11 happened.

The doctor-editors didn’t anticipate many attendees at the gala. Yet more than 100 people came — the crowd was “standing room only,” said Ofri, who has authored several books, most recently, When We Do Harm, and written essays for The New York Times and The New Yorker. “That’s when we knew we were on the right track…. It drove home the point that in moments of vulnerability, people turn to the arts.”

Years later, they still do. BLR is thriving, as are several other health-themed literary journals, such as Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Healing Muse, Hektoen International Journal, and Ars Medica. Beyond providing outlets for writing, art, and scholarship, these publications play a vital role in supporting the psychological health of the doctors who contribute to them. Here’s the story behind how BLR and Intima have endured and why their longevity matters.

BLR

Since 2001, BLR — widely considered the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting — has published two print volumes and hosted two readings annually. Contributors have ranged from healthcare providers and caregivers to patients and families, from new writers to literary luminaries, such as Rick Moody, Ha Jin, Abraham Verghese, and Celeste Ng.

The publication has evolved over the years. In 2018, BLR collaborated with students at Parsons School of Design on a redesign. During the pandemic, it became an independent nonprofit literary arts organization and now runs writing workshops and contests and hosts events. Recently, BLR launched a free year-long program to teach narrative tools to healthcare trainees.

For Ofri, reading the 5000 submissions BLR receives each year is worth the mammoth amount of time and effort she invests. Based on personal experience, she understands the vital role writing plays for clinicians.

Ofri didn’t begin a writing practice until after she’d completed her residency and took time off to travel. “My whole life, I’d sprinted forward,” she said. “I left high school a year early, I’d been going, going, going. It was the first time I stopped.” She began writing stories that “had been bubbling around inside and that I’d been carrying,” like reflections on watching her patients at Bellevue Hospital die from AIDS. “People were dying brutal deaths,” she said. “It was a depressing, grief-laden time. I was seeing the death of people the same age as me, in their twenties and thirties…I had to put [my thoughts and feelings] somewhere. If I didn’t, it was like a wide-open wound constantly flaring.”

In an essay for The New Yorker, she described the first patient she ever wrote about, a boy of about 12.

His jersey was pushed up to reveal a smooth preadolescent chest. His pristine basketball sneakers were oddly bright in a room that has since receded into shadow in my memory. I hardly registered the narrowness of the gap between our ages because I was blindsided by how small the bullet hole was. I didn’t have the language to articulate how something so tiny could carve such devastation. 

For Pria Anand, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine in Boston and a past contributor to BLR, writing is equally therapeutic. “Over time, it’s easy to forget the human body is heartbreaking or wondrous,” said Anand, whose book, The Mind Electric, was named a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a Best Book of 2025 by Publishers Weekly and Barnes & Noble.

“Humans are designed to habituate to things they see enough that they can forget why they’re wild or wondrous,” she said. “By attending to those details and writing for an audience of nondoctors, it’s a gut check. It makes you clock the things in this work that are profound or moving or heartbreaking. Writing reconnects me with this sense of wonder about the work we do.”

Anand’s writing is vivid and compassionate, which is evident in a story she published in BLR about a young girl kicked by a horse.

Tatu’s stride was five times as long as Lydia’s, and his front feet passed over her head, and she could feel something sharp and cold part her hair. She held her breath as if her head were under the water. Tatu’s front hooves touched the sand, and his back heel caught Lydia’s chest as he launched himself forward again, and all she could feel was that she wanted to breathe and couldn’t, that the front of her chest wouldn’t lift off of the back. Beneath Lydia’s ribs, the left ventricle of her heart had just closed in on itself, emptying its blood into the curve of her aorta. Lydia flew, and by the time her head thumped the dry sand up on the beach, she couldn’t feel anything.

Intima 

The literary journal Intima is also devoted to health. Yet unlike BLR, the online-only publication arose out of a university setting. In 2000, Rita Charon, MD, PhD, a general internist and literary scholar, co-founded the Master of Science program in narrative medicine at Columbia University in New York City (she is currently its executive director).

“When one sees a patient, all kinds of wondering, concerns, and impressions come flooding down,” said Charon, a professor of social medicine and medicine whose articles have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

“We only know the things we know because we capture them in some kind of form,” she said. “It helps to write these things in a private place…because you are then able to expose what this interaction…brought to your mind. When we do that, it helps us locate where we are and where we think the patient is.”

That said, she was quick to emphasize the necessity of securing consent from patients before publishing their stories.

In 2010, graduate students in the Columbia program created Intima, releasing the first issue in 2011. Promoting the theory and practice of narrative medicine, the journal publishes nonfiction, poetry, fiction, essays, visual art, audio, and video.

Bruce H. Campbell, MD, FACS, a retired ENT specialist and surgeon, has been an Intima contributor and is now a nonfiction editor for the magazine who helped edit the journal’s just-published anthology, Where It Hurts. Campbell holds a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and authored A Fullness of Uncertain Significance about his life in medicine. He has also published fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, photography, and humor in JAMA, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Pulse.

During Campbell’s 35 years of clinical practice, he always carried 3 × 5 index cards in his pockets, he said, to note down reflections. Along with priming him to be more attuned to his patients, writing served a therapeutic purpose. When he was in his late thirties, Campbell was the only cancer surgeon in his specialty at his institution, he recalled. “There was no one for me to talk to in a way for me to process some of the stuff I was going through. I needed some place to spend a few minutes with some of my thoughts.”

Among his many poignant pieces is an Intima story he wrote about a surgeon who makes a mistake.

Soon, the mass is almost out. As his knife makes its final swipe, blood unexpectedly floods the operative field. “More sponges!” He instinctively presses his left fingertips firmly into the center of the wound, staunching the flow of blood pouring from the vein he has inadvertently cut. “I need you to pay attention!” he barks at the surgical tech. “Unclamp the suction!” She reaches to release the suction tubing. “Now give me another hemostat!” 

Beyond Literary Journals

Some writers begin with literature, then expand into other types of writing. Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, a cardiologist at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, New York, drew from his medical training to write his best-selling memoir, Intern. Jauhar, also an associate professor at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York, then went on to write Heart, Doctored, and My Father’s Brain, the latter inspired by his experiences navigating his father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Jauhar is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He’s been in the line of fire publicly at times, he said. After Fox News tweeted one of his articles, on broadening the definition of death to help improve the supply of donated organs, Jauhar received death threats. “That crossed the line and was very upsetting,” he said. “Still, for the most part, when people engage, even when critically, I don’t mind. I don’t see my role as advocating for a particular position but instead for starting a conversation and having people think about dilemmas in medicine.”

Doctors become characters in their patients’ stories, said Ofri. “We are a part of their drama.” But they can also be narrators, writing to help process often-challenging clinical experiences. Publications like health-oriented literary journals provide a critical therapeutic outlet. “In medicine, we have this continuous train of activity, and you hardly recover from one thing to the next,” said Campbell. “Writing gives you a chance to put periods at the end of sentences.”

The experts cited in this article had no relevant disclosures.