Arthur Lazarus is a physician-author whose work spans narrative medicine, physician leadership, artificial intelligence, health care ethics, medical culture, and fiction. He has published more than 500 articles and essays across scientific journals, professional publications, and online platforms.
He is the author of numerous books on narrative medicine, AI in medicine, career development, and the changing moral landscape of health care, as well as fictional series including Rounds Never End, Sick and Systemic, and Real Medicine, Unreal Stories. His writing explores the forces reshaping modern medicine while preserving a central commitment to story, meaning, judgment, and the human relationship at the heart of care.
He shares updates on LinkedIn.
Harvard’s decision to dismantle its Writing Center as an independent entity and to lay off its longtime director, Jane Rosenzweig, has sparked an unusual level of anger. Students, faculty, former tutors, and alums have protested a decision that might otherwise have slipped into the fog of administrative restructuring.
The controversy is about more than a single employee or even a single writing center. It raises a much larger question: What …
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Augmented intelligence is the model education needs
An excerpt from Essays and Echoes: Reflections from a Life in Medicine.
Every year, someone ranks the best states in which to practice medicine, presumably because physicians have been unable to make major life decisions without consulting a color-coded map.
The 2026 WalletHub survey evaluates all 50 states and Washington, D.C., across 19 measures, including physician wages, malpractice costs, hospital availability, projected competition, and burnout. Montana ranked first, New York …
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What do best states to practice medicine rankings miss?
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault introduced the concept of the “medical gaze” to describe how physicians translate a patient’s lived experience into biomedical terms, emphasizing information that fits a clinical framework while setting aside what does not. Every gaze involves selecting certain details from the vast stream of sensory information. In medicine, that selection often privileges disease, symptoms, and measurable findings while overlooking the personal, social, and …
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The ethics of medical images begins with provenance
An attending physician recently described one of the most troubling encounters she had witnessed involving a medical student. A student emerged from a well-child visit and offered a reassuring summary: “The kid is fine. Everything is good.”
The patient, however, was not a child whose history could be dismissed with a casual adjective. The child had undergone surgical repair of a ventricular septal defect and had a history of failure to …
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Why “fine” is not clinical reasoning in medical education
Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) had a reasonable institutional story to tell.
U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, MD, MBA, is an alumnus. He is an emergency medicine physician, a Marine veteran, a former student body president, and the first MSM graduate elected to Congress. From the perspective of a communications office, the announcement almost writes itself: alumnus returns home to deliver the commencement speech; physician-leader addresses the next generation; a school devoted …
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Why diversity in medicine is a clinical intervention
In a Philadelphia courtroom this spring, a malpractice verdict unraveled in real time. A juror stood up during the reading of the verdict and said to the judge, “I think I misunderstood your question.” Moments later, when asked again if she agreed, she answered, “No, I do not.” What followed was confusion, re-polling, shifting answers, and ultimately a legally valid but deeply disturbing conclusion: The defendant physician was partly negligent, …
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Why juries struggle with medical malpractice cases
