iris: the UNC journal of medicine, literature & visual art

Experiences involving illness, caring for the ill, and wellness have profound effects that are often difficult to assimilate. The creative arts provide all those who experience illness and healing a means of expression, communication, and mutual understanding that is unavailable through medicine, science, or scholarship alone. Literature and art uniquely merge emotional, aesthetic, and moral perspectives; help link experience, interpretation, and critical reflection; and increase our ability to understand the many kinds of suffering and healing that are experienced by those involved in health care, whether as providers or as patients.

UNC and Chapel Hill - the university, hospitals and local health care system, and the people who staff them and are served by them - are the focus of our efforts to foster a community of creative conversation about the meaning of health care and the expperience of illness, disability, and wellness. this community is constantly changing, but it nonetheless has a powerful impact on those who join it, however briefly. iris: the UNC journal of medicine, literature & visual art provides a forum for creative discourse among the members of this community, both inside and outside its pages.

iris: The multiple meanings of our title help represent the complexity of our mission. The Greek goddess Iris was a messenger of the gods and delivered their words to mortals. She gave her name to the rainbow, symbolic of the many voices that make up our publication. Artistically, she is often represented as winged and bearing a herald's staff, reminiscent of the caduceus, a Greek symbol of healing. The iris is also the name of two opposing sheets of muscle in the eye, which control the entry of light, much like a camera's lens. The iris thus manipulates our visual impression of the surrounding world, even as its striking pigments help individualize us to that world. Finally, the iris is a family of handsome flowers, the roots of which produce orris oil, a medicinal agent in older traditions of healing.

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