VOLVOX: Making Narrative Medicine Happen Alumni Speaker Series

What’s the Curriculum?: Building a Humanities Track for Emergency Medicine Residents with Rachel Kowalsky, MD, MPH, CPA'26 in Narrative Medicine

Moderated by Rudy Malcom, SPS'25 in Narrative Medicine

In 2021, the NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia and Cornell Emergency Medicine Residency introduced Academic Practice Tracks (APTs) in several disciplines, including Health Humanities. The vision of the Humanities APT is to cultivate fluency in seeing and hearing, receiving and transmitting patient stories, bearing witness, and making meaning in the provision of emergency care. Over the years, the track has welcomed dozens of artists and piloted multiple learning formats, while navigating limited funding and the challenge of scaling a big-hearted program to a small, over-scheduled audience. Dr. Rachel Kowalsky will discuss the current curriculum, along with lessons learned from building and sustaining the program.

Dr. Rachel Kowalsky is a pediatric emergency medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, as well as a fiction writer and essayist with five Pushcart nominations. She is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, and Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she leads the health humanities curriculum and serves as Site Director for the New York-Presbyterian Emergency Medicine Residency’s Academic Practice Track in the Humanities and Faculty Advisor to the student-run health humanities journal. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, Intima, Atticus Review, and elsewhere, while her academic writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the American Journal of Bioethics. She has spoken nationally on health humanities at venues including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Her published work is available at rachelkowalskymd.com.