champagne tap
she is curled on her side like a child / eyes closed, back exposed.
Featured
Contributing Writer
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Julia is a third year medical student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2020 with a major in Health Care Policy. She loves curating oddly specific Spotify playlists, going to concerts, and keeping up her NYT crossword puzzle streak. Julia hopes to pursue a career in surgery.
To Give Your Heart And Soul (2021)
Physicians give their heart and soul to the practice of medicine. Caring for patients at their most vulnerable moments is a heavy responsibility and privilege that medical professionals must carry.
Dying Is Not
Dying is not / as romantic as I once thought. / I think you always knew this.
Outside In (2022)
This is a reimagination of anatomy from the outside in.
Sexual and Reproductive Health in Palestine: A Medical Student’s Experience in Health Education
In September 2020, I started to volunteer as a health educator in sexual and reproductive health and rights with mobile clinics of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, reaching marginalized communities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). I worked in the villages of two cities in the West Bank — Jenin and Qalqilya.
Until You Make It
When my family saw me painstakingly hand-placing individual sprinkles on the apices of buttercream rosettes at age 15, I justified this obsessive behavior by telling them, “I’m just practicing precision for the day when I get to inject into people’s faces.”
Pathologies of Immigration: Resignation Syndrome
Uppgivenhetssyndrom, also termed resignation syndrome, is a distressing ailment in which patients — often young children — completely withdraw from the activities of daily life. With no underlying neurological or physical disease, these patients lose the will to live, essentially becoming apathetic.
Rethinking and Retooling the Average Diagnostic Radiology Rotation
Unlike other specialties, radiology is often an elective rotation that focuses on diagnostics and image interpretation. Such tasks are mainly done by the specialty’s residents with little care for medical students to be involved with.
Transforming Trauma
Trauma can be inflicted on the micro scale — to the mind, to the body and to the spirit itself. Oftentimes, we tend to sideline these transgressions, but their accumulation can damage our sense of wholeness and peace with both ourselves and the world.
Choreiform Tango
The intruder slithers in at midnight, / slinking his way to the boy fast asleep, / the tangled mess of hospital wires his field of untrimmed grass,
Operating Room
As I step carefully into the sterile field / past the rows of scalpels, forceps and clamps, / I sense a gentle fluttering in my chest.
Abrasions, by Morgan Shier, MD
My mother likes to tell the story of how, as a small child, I referred to the superficial wounds sustained in my first head-over-handlebars accident as an “abrasion.” I remember staring at my knee, fascinated by my body’s ability to heal itself. The sacred anatomy of wounds, atoms as spacious as galaxies, coalescing and woven with no instruction of my own to renew what had been lost.
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Ross University School of Medicine
Dr. Morgan Shier, MD is a family medicine physician in Colorado and was one of our first in-Training writers in 2014 and a featured writer in our print book in-Training: Stories from Tomorrow’s Physicians.