School of Medicine students Divya Bhatia, SOM ’21, and Qiuwei Yang, SOM ’22, had never met on the UMass Medical School campus until last year when Hugh Silk, MD, MPH, professor of family medicine & community health, sought students to start a podcast about narrative medicine. Their shared interest in storytelling brought them together to create the podcast, Murmurs: Stories from our Journey in Medicine, as part of a capstone project.
“There’s so much power in telling your story, because undoubtedly someone else feels similarly,” Bhatia said. “The podcast is another way of telling stories orally and conversationally.”
Bhatia and Yang worked with Dr. Silk as their advisor to produce a season of Murmurs. Each episode provides a space for medical students and caregivers to discuss what they’re going through and to find meaning in what they’ve experienced. Writers read their own stories, and then discuss them with the hosts.
In a new Voices of UMassMed, Bhatia and Yang discuss one episode that highlights how medical students share similar experiences—such as meeting their anatomical donor for the first time—but may process it in very different ways.
“Just seeing the body there, I think really just hit me in a way that I didn't expect,” said Yang.
“I tried to approach it as scientifically as possible. But I think for many people, it's that humanistic piece that comes first,” Bhatia said. “For me, it was a little bit late.”
To listen to the full Voices of UMassMed podcast, visit: umassmed.edu/news/voices. To be notified when a new episode is available, subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes.
Murmurs: Stories from our Journey in Medicine is featured on the Lamar Souter Library’s Medical Humanities Lab. Listeners can subscribe to Murmurs via Apple iTunes Podcasts, Spotify and Anchor.
