“We do not store experience as data, like a computer, we story it.”²

“It is difficult
 to get the news from poems,
 yet men die miserably every day
 for lack
 of what is found there.”³

Poetry and medicine have gone hand in hand since Apollo was the god of both. Literature is a vital element in medicine: biomedical science looks at a slice of experience; literature is as wide as life itself. We would like to invite you on a trip into the depth of life: through literature. Every issue of Medical Humanities will contain a section of original creative writing, offering a window onto the practice, experience, thought and feeling of colleagues, through their writing. Our own and others' stories of practice are our stores of experience, knowledge and skill—embedded in practice. Writing them makes the experience more available to the writers themselves. Reading them, in pages such as this, is a sharing of that wisdom.