About Us
Our Mission & Vision
Impressions is an undergraduate-run literary journal of narrative medicine that spotlights the voices of individuals engaging with health, illness, medicine, caregiving, and patient care before professional school.
Our name, Impressions, reflects the formative nature of these experiences: the first time we enter a clinical space, witness illness, care for a patient, or begin to understand healthcare from a new perspective. These encounters may be early, but they can leave lasting impressions, shaping how we understand patients, medicine, and ourselves.
Impressions is a space for individuals to pause, reflect, and give meaning to these experiences through creative nonfiction, fiction, the arts, and more. By sharing narratives from our earliest encounters with healthcare, we hope to cultivate empathy, attentiveness, and curiosity among those beginning their journeys in medicine and more.
These encounters may be among our first, but they are only the beginning. We believe that learning to listen, reflect, and tell stories before professional training can lay the foundation for a lifelong practice of thoughtful, humanistic patient care.
What is Narrative Medicine?
Narrative medicine is an interdisciplinary approach to healthcare that uses writing, literature, the arts, and reflective practice to better understand the experiences of patients, caregivers, clinicans, and communities. Through storytelling, we restore a human context to healthcare—one that can deepen clinicians’ empathy or help patients make sense of illness. Since its formal establishment in 2001 by Dr. Rita Charon at Columbia University, narrative medicine has grown into an internationally recognized field devoted to fostering more attentive, empathetic, and humanistic care.