The latest publication of the Wisconsin Medical Journal (WMJ) is an important double issue of 170 pages, entitled, “Lessons Learned from the Pandemic.”
Its many articles are accompanied by artwork throughout. Two physicians from the Department of Pediatrics, Ryan McAdams, MD, professor and chief of the Division of Neonatology and Newborn Nursery and a member of the Division of Global Pediatrics, and Kelly McGregory, DO, associate professor and interim chief of the Division of Child Protection, contributed their art to the issue.
With his digital illustration, “New Mourning,” McAdams reported that he “aimed to convey the grief, loneliness, and division that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, an impact that is still being felt throughout America.”
Through McGregory’s digital photograph, “COVID-19: The Prickly Menace That Made Us Bloom,” she seeks to find grace amid the suffering. “Despite its wretchedness,” McGregory offered, “the pandemic helped us bloom in the worst of circumstances. We survived. We tell our stories. Although still not free, we keep blooming.”
The artworks offered within this revelatory document provide visual respite among the important written offerings.
Published through a partnership between the Medical College of Wisconsin and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Wisconsin Medical Journal is devoted to the interests of the medical profession and health care in the Midwest. This issue offers a wealth of information and perceptions, relevant, diverse, and cogent.
Under four broad themes, scores of contributors from many areas of health care examined the issues, effects, challenges, successes, failures, dilemmas, eventual lessons — and the remaining haunting and complex questions that COVID-19 revealed. Offerings are presented under the umbrellas of Theme 1: Patient Care; Theme 2: Workforce; Theme 3: Public Health Approaches; and Theme 4: Inequities Related to COVID-19. Authors presented original research, case reports, brief reports, reviews, commentaries, and personal views.
The editor-in-chief of WMJ, Fahad Aziz, MD, associate professor in the Department of Medicine Division of Nephrology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, wrote in his introduction, “All of these reports — and the artwork interspersed throughout — help to illuminate the multifaceted nature of the challenges we faced during the pandemic and the imperative to address these challenges within the broader context of healthcare delivery.”