Candid literary accounts from frontline health care workers shed light on the challenges and triumphs of working in medicine in a testament to human resilience, ingenuity, and compassion

Health care workers witness us at our lowest and highest points on a daily basis. They’re healers, heroes, confidants—but they’re also real people who struggle with burnout, frustration, fear, and self-doubt.

In The Space In Between, 60 doctors, nurses, therapists, EMTs, patient advocates, and other medical professionals offer a window into the space between health and illness, life and death as they share stories of difficult patients, medical bureaucracy, their own fallibility, and the successes that make everything worth it. Their essays, poems, and short stories are by turns conversational, urgent, plain-spoken, poetic, heart-rending and heart-mending.

A doctor shares the mental checklist she goes through when intubating a young patient.

A therapist holds on to a box of personal documents a client couldn’t bear either to read or throw out.

A doctor finds an unconventional “cure” for an ER regular with a dangerous affinity for fajitas.

An intensive care physician remembers the harrowing months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A busy resident pauses to listen to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 with a dementia patient.

Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, wonder, joy: They’re all part of a day’s work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.