VJournal

Jean Heard was a graduate of the Juilliard School and an active studio musician in Nashville. During the past few days as I was thinking about these words to honor Jean Heard, a still, small voice in the back of my mind kept repeating something the fifth chancellor of Vanderbilt… Read More

Dr. Otis Rickman with the tools of his trade Prologue “Help me understand,” she said. My patient was the delightful silver-haired matriarch of a large family. I was seeing her in consultation for a pulmonary nodule in the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s Thoracic Oncology Clinic on a crisp afternoon in the… Read More

Flood stories are community stories. They bring us connection with our neighbors (broadly speaking); we share those stories with one another in hallways, on sidewalks, in checkout lines, through Facebook and email, or over a nice dinner. They link us to the people around us through a sense of shared experience,… Read More

“How are you holding up?” “What about the loud music?” “Do students knock on your door at midnight?” “Do parents call you?” Reflecting on my first year as a faculty head of house in The Commons for first-year students, these are a reasonably representative sample of the questions I’ve fielded… Read More

“Jenny,” as I’ll call her, came in for a follow-up appointment the other day. You probably don’t know Jenny personally, but you read about her all the time. That’s because Jenny is a statistic, a faceless number. Jenny is an outgoing, always smiling 40-year-old who has been badly crippled with… Read More

October 2008: A 62-year-old man, otherwise healthy, notices his heart is beating rapidly and irregularly. When he goes to see his doctor, a common heart-rhythm abnormality called atrial fibrillation is diagnosed. Many therapeutic options are discussed, and the patient elects to try drugs to keep his heart rhythm normal. Read More

Illustration by Bruno Budrovic A few years ago I taught a non-majors chemistry course at Vanderbilt. I wanted to make the class relevant, so I had the students write a paper about the application of chemistry to everyday things. Students wrote about Dead Sea salts, Gatorade, NASCAR tires,… Read More