Survive and Thrive journal may not score highly on traditional metrics of scholarly impact, says co-editor David Beard, but it is among the most important work he does.
Nothing I have written for Survive and Thrive, A Journal of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine has ever been cited in an academic publication. Our most downloaded author, Amy Robillard, has seen her essays for us cited fewer than two dozen times (according to Google Scholar). The metrics of academic impact don’t measure the work of Survive and Thrive very well. But co-editing the journal is among the most important things I do as a scholar.
Survive and Thrive was born after its founder, Rex Veeder, survived a sudden cardiac arrest (fatal about 95 percent of the time) in 2007. Veeder was a Coleridge scholar, writing teacher, and administrator at St Cloud State University, Minnesota; after the cardiac arrests (he survived multiple), he redirected his energies toward the medical humanities and narrative medicine. Powered by a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD), which moved his blood when his heart no longer could, Veeder built conferences bringing musicians, artists, and theater professionals into conversation with survivors, providers, and humanities scholars. From those conferences, he built a journal.
Rex has passed on, but the journal remains and manifests the same spirit as the conferences. We publish scholarly articles on the sociology of medicine, the health humanities, health communication, and related areas. We publish critical reflections and creative nonfiction by scholars, by caregivers, by medical providers, and by survivors. And we publish poetry. In every issue of the journal, we continue to host the kinds of conversations Veeder picked up in the conferences. Only now, instead of doing so only in St Cloud, Minnesota, we do so worldwide. Below is a map of our reach (measured in downloads):
I struggle with how to frame our international readership. When I talk to a young scholar or creative writer about submitting to the journal, I know it’s a risk – if the tenure clock is ticking, a journal with a high impact factor is a solid, unquestionable choice. Publishing in the Journal of the Medical Humanities, with its established impact factor, its presence in Springer databases – that’s a good and easy choice for publishing work that will be read by academics, in a conversation (primarily) for academics. However, the conversation we want to host reaches more people touched by the healthcare system, and it reaches (for example) into the Arctic Circle, and to Pond Inlet, population 1,555, on Baffin Island:
There, two articles published in Survive and Thrive have been downloaded a total of four times. Both of them are about medical education. Mitra Emad’s ‘”Taking the Skin Back:” Abjection and Reflective Practice in a Cadaver Lab‘ looks at the ways that medical students are brought into the cadaver lab (and into a relationship with the cadaver). Emad is a medical anthropologist who has comparatively studied cadaver labs in medical education and training in acupuncture in traditional Chinese medicine. In ‘Hearing the Music in Medicine’, Haaris Khan reflects on their experiences in their third year as a medical intern.
Someone on that island wanted to know something about the human dimension of medical school. They found Survive and Thrive, and through Survive and Thrive, they could participate in a conversation with a medical anthropologist (critically reflecting on medical education) and with a medical student, writing creatively while in the thick of it.
When we receive a new submission by an early career academic or, sometimes, by an advanced career medical provider, I point to Pond Inlet. I want them to be impressed by the far reach of the journal. But, too, I want them to imagine how their article serves the reader who wants to be in a conversation around their topic. That reader could be an academic (the audience we are most accustomed to writing for), and it could be a reader trying to understand what their children are experiencing as they move through medical school (that’s the story I tell myself about Pond Inlet). It could be a reader who is surviving a medical condition and they just don’t want to be alone in their struggle. When the right reader finds Survive and Thrive, the effect is more than an impact factor can measure.
About the author
David Beard is professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota Duluth and co-editor (with Suzanne Black, Julia Brown, and Steven Katz) of Survive and Thrive. The journal’s current calls for papers circle reproductive justice, perinatal loss, and birth trauma – co-edited by a team that includes academics, doulas, and a retired hospice nurse. You can join their conversation by submitting work to https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/. If you’d like to contribute as a peer reviewer or propose a topic for a future issue, email dbeard@d.umn.edu.
