Table of Contents
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Welcome from Hospital Drive
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| What should we call the new journal?
In late October 1983 my wife and I arrived in Charlottesville for job interviews at the University of Virginia Medical Center. We were a five-minute walk from the Lawn and from the Rotunda of Thomas Jefferson’s academic village, founded in 1819, across the street from the School of Medicine, also founded in 1819, and a two-minute walk, if we didn’t get lost, from the University Hospital. The late fall afternoon still had light; the trees still had leaves; the leaves still had color; the street, Hospital Drive, still had free parking. We got out of the car and wandered around. Pedestrians still had right of way. It did not look like a medical center; it looked like a university. It looked like history. We did not know anyone, but we felt welcome. |
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Last July, 2006, I visited Sharon Hostler, then Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development, now Interim Vice President and Dean, and we decided that the world could use another journal of arts and letters, partially to nurture the growing writing community in our corner of the world, partially to provide a national venue for those of us in patient care who feel compelled to share, reinvent, revise, and retell the stories we gather on rounds, in clinic, in classrooms and lecture halls, in the lab, in the OR, in the ER, on home visits, in nursing homes, and, of course, given the nature of this beast, in meeting after meeting after meeting.
Sharon’s office overlooks Hospital Drive. “What should we call the new journal?” she asked.
With the blessing of the Dean, now Provost, Tim Garson, with pooled funds from the Dean’s Office and from the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities, with a small editorial staff and a larger review board, with serendipity and humility, with gratitude and with appreciation for the trust and courage invested by authors and artists (often, as we hoped, unpublished) who submit their work, we offer our inaugural issue, Summer 2007, one year after Sharon and I decided that Hospital Drive sounded, well, just right.
—Daniel Becker, M.D.
Editor in Chief
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Stories
We start telling stories when we are about four years old: struggling to answer the why, the where, the when, and the who of the world. “The sky is blue because the bowling giants spilled blue paint.” Kids create a circle from a crayon line by three years old and that same circle becomes the sun by four. Whether the sun is yellow or blue makes little difference until much later. We keep telling stories and playing with our scribbles throughout our lives, continuing to figure out the existential whys and wherefores. |
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Hospitals and clinics generate stories in all kinds of formats: patient histories, student write-ups, attending notes, debriefings, critical incident reviews, consults, patient transfer notes, patient acceptance notes, rushed “Can you believe this?” anecdotes in halls and stairwells, endless e-mails, the occasional eulogy.
We grow up and continue to explain the world through stories and images.
Hospital Drive presents the best of these stories submitted by our peers from across the country: nurses and doctors, students and post-docs, security guards and CEOs, employees and volunteers. We welcome everyone with stories to tell and stories that lead to other stories, stories told in words and stories told in images, stories that allow us to appreciate the drama and the comedy and the spectacle that sustain and enrich our humanity.
—Sharon L. Hostler, M.D.
Interim Vice President and Dean
University of Virginia School of Medicine |
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