Sketchbooks & Sutures: A Blog about Learning to Heal.

Abstract

My name is Sam Scharff, and I am entering my fifth year as an MD PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I write and illustrate a blog called Sketchbooks & Sutures, which can be found at http://sketchbooksandsutures.tumblr.com/. While I have enjoyed many positive experiences in medical school, my time as a student has also proved to be challenging in ways that I could have never expected. Finding people who had the time and energy for authentic conversations about awkward and complex topics became quite difficult – especially when my peers and I had such different schedules. At first I began writing and illustrating mostly for myself, as I assumed that others wouldn’t really find my art to be particularly meaningful. But as I began to circulate some of my pieces to friends and classmates via email, I came to understand that many of my peers were experiencing similar challenges – problems of doubt, identity, and mental health. My peers’ responses would generate an email thread that was filled with the kind of genuine dialogue about human problems that I had been craving since medical school began. Even if we couldn’t be in the same room, we finally had a way to talk about it. I was encouraged enough by this feedback that I uploaded my art and writing to my blog, Sketchbooks & Sutures. The response has been overwhelmingly positive – a modest number of students, faculty, and other Internet users from around the globe have interacted with the digital art, leaving comments about how the art has validated them in some way. Looking to the future, I hope that Sketchbooks & Sutures will continue to generate authentic and accessible conversations about the human dimensions of health and healing. Thank you for taking a look! J Med Humanit (2015) 36:391–394 DOI 10.1007/s10912-015-9351-7