Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Embodiment in Medicine & Trainee Writing Award

Posted on 2026-04-01

Special Issue Led by Guest Editor, Dr. Rana Awdish

Dr. Rana Awdish is the bestselling author of the landmark medical memoir, In Shock, and the forthcoming book After Shock. She is the Medical Director of Care Experience at Henry Ford Health, and a pulmonary critical care physician. Recognized as a leading voice on healing, Dr. Awdish’s work has been recognized through accolades such as the Schwartz Center’s National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year, and Press Ganey’s Physician of the Year. She has shared her expertise through diverse dissemination channels, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Washington Post, NPR, and CNN. The International Journal of Whole Person Care excitedly welcomes Dr. Awdish’s leadership on a forthcoming special issue exploring the role of Embodiment in Medicine.

Embodiment in Medicine

Through the theme of Embodiment in Medicine, this issue seeks to re-center the body as the foundation through which care is given and received. Contemporary medical training and practice often require clinicians to distance themselves from their own bodies through depersonalization and self-suppression, while patients’ bodies are abstracted and reduced to data, images, metrics, and protocols. Embodiment calls us back to lived experience: how illness is felt, how healing unfolds, and how clinicians inhabit bodies shaped by training, power dynamics, fatigue, vulnerability, and moral responsibility. This theme invites reflection on clinical encounters as meetings between bodies marked by asymmetry, history, culture, disability, race, gender, and trauma, and on how these forces shape diagnosis, care, and healing. Embodiment is understood here as a clinical, ethical, pedagogical, and relational concern, attending to touch, presence, posture, pain, breath, silence, movement, and narrative, and asking what becomes possible when medicine reclaims the body as a knowing, communicative, and relational participant in care.

We want to hear about how embodiment shapes your work in whole person care

This special issue of the International Journal of Whole Person Care explores how embodiment shapes the practice, teaching, and scholarship of whole person care. We welcome first-person narratives and reflective essays from clinicians, educators, researchers, and other health professionals at all career stages that consider, for example:

  • How bodily experience (of illness, disability, fatigue, aging, or recovery) informs your understanding of care.
  • How health professionals navigate inhabiting their own bodies in environments structured by hierarchy, time pressure, and moral distress.
  • How encounters between bodies marked by race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, or trauma influence trust, diagnosis, and treatment.
  • How touch, proximity, posture, silence, and movement function in your clinical, educational, or research settings.
  • How training and institutional cultures shape the ways you listen to, respond to, or suppress bodily knowledge, whether that be your own and/or your patients’.
  • How attention to embodiment opens up new possibilities for healing, solidarity, and whole person care.

Submission Guidelines

  • Brief paper (500-2000 words) focused on the theme of embodiment in the context of whole person care.
  • Submit via the Commentary stream of IJWPC’s online portal: https://ijwpc.mcgill.ca/about/submissions
  • Please email ijwpc@mcgill.ca regarding any questions.
  • Submission deadline: June 26th, 2026

Are you currently a trainee? Submit to our Trainee Writing Award!

  • Trainees in either a health professional clinical program or health-related research program are invited to submit a brief essay (500-2000 words) focused on the theme of embodiment in the context of whole person care.
  • A selection committee will review all submissions received before the deadline and the selected submission will be published in forthcoming issue of IJWPC.
  • Submit via the Commentary stream of IJWPC’s online portal: https://ijwpc.mcgill.ca/about/submissions
  • Please email ijwpc@mcgill.ca regarding any questions.
  • Submission deadline: June 26th, 2026