BLR Editor Danielle Ofri on “Why Medicine Needs Literary Magazines”

And maybe a literary journal is not so much pages bound onto a spine, but rather a community of people—writers, readers, listeners, thinkers—who find solace in the comforts and confrontations of the written word. 

– Danielle Ofri

In a new article in The Lancet, BLR Editor Danielle Ofri offers a retrospective on her journey in medical school and the ways in which literature would change the course of her career, and her life.

She’d started medical school with the plan of becoming a bench scientist, but her career changed radically once she began hearing the stories of patients on Bellevue wards. “I began to recognize,” she recalls, “what wiser clinicians had always intuited—if you wanted any hope of helping a patient navigate their illness, you needed to understand their story.”

Read the full story of how BLR came to be, in Danielle’s article.

Learn more about BLR’s 25th anniversary.