Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun.

These are the opening lines of “Girl,” a story by author Jamaica Kincaid (The New Yorker, 1978). In it, Kincaid distills thousands of experiences from an Antiguan childhood into 49 instructions from mother to daughter. They are instructions for many tasks—for cooking, for survival, for household peace. They are delivered quickly, with precise detail, with smothering affection, without apology. They resonate, unsurprisingly, in our narrative medicine workshop with young physicians who are joining hospital teams, caring for patients, and learning a culture of medicine that asks them to rapidly adopt the knowledge, style, and practices of senior physicians they are working for. Kincaid offers the group a type of education not unlike their own training—a curriculum that can be unofficial yet forceful. With striking similarity to a young girl growing up in an adult world, new physicians join a system that demands they quickly learn the skills of their craft, the rules of survival, and the values they will fight for all while navigating their instinctive psychological responses to illness, injury, healing, injustice, and grief.

The power of arts and literature to interpret a complicated world is well understood if still underleveraged in medical training. As a 3-person faculty group (a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist as director, an emergency medicine physician as assistant director, and an internist as Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Medical Humanities) in a burgeoning narrative medicine department of a busy urban hospital and medical school, we pursue a mission outlined in The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine: “To develop deep and accurate attention to the accounts of self that are told and heard in the contexts of healthcare.”¹