Paulette Mehta

She comes into my clinic, a stranger, and tells me she has cancer.   I check her record, hear her story, feel for liver, spleen, and lymph nodes.   She shares her feelings, her dreams, her fears, her hopes.  She hugs me.  From strangers to soulmates, we begin our sacred journey together.   

Paulette Mehta M.D., M.P.H., is a professor of Hematology-Oncology in the Department of Internal Medicine at UAMS. She is also the editor-in-chief of Medicine and Medicine, and a staff hematologist/oncologist at the Central Arkansas Veterans healthcare system.

Philip Palade

Europe’s been burning, Pakistan is drowning, but I’m only one person, so how can I make a difference?  Then I remember Greta advocating wear old clothes, buy, drive and fly less.  So today I wear clothes and shoes with holes and eat more meatless meals to reflect the power of one to change the world.

Philip Palade is a professor in Pharmacology & Toxicology at UAMS who wrote this piece in response to “The Story of More,” a Provost’s Book Club selection on climate change. 

John McPherson

“I sense intruders.”

“Are you sure?  Windows closed.   Doors shut.”

“I heard the front door open.  Someone’s entering.”

“Again?  Why do they keep coming?”

“Probably on a dare.  You know humans.”

“Look, a candle.  A man and a woman.”

“You do it this time.”

“Jack, the candle went out.”

“I know, I felt a draft.”

John McPherson is an octogenarian who started submitting poems and other short works in his mid-seventies, and wrote this piece “just for the fun of it.” 

Stephen Phillip Johnson

Enter a hospital, you’ve entered a different world.

Death nods politely at you in the wide, clean hallways.

You nod back; in the ‘other’ world, no such intercourse.

Hope and death chat convivially.  I tell you, it’s different.

People foggily re-awaken, are snuffed like tapers flickering.

And all the while, outside these walls, supposition lives.

Stephen Phillip Johnson is a Mountain Home carpenter, writing- his itch. Within the halls of medicine, where he’s been (repeatedly) healed, reside flocks of muses.