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Sari Altschuler

@sarialtschuler.bsky.social

2.5K followers 1.3K following 86 posts

Associate Prof, Director of Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern. The Medical Imagination (Penn Press, 2018) + Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, 2026). Coeditor: Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU, 2023).

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

It's real! Too many people to thank, but I'm feeling so very grateful for the years of conversation, learning, and generosity that made this book possible. More about the book below --

Left hand holds a white hardcover book. The top half features an American flag with ASL alphabet replacing stars. Bottom half reads “before disability. A history of American citizenship. Sari Altschuler” in blue, red, and off-white text.

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

It’s feeling very real!!! Publication date: June 16, 2026. @pennpress.bsky.social

This is a white book cover with an older American flag in the top half. The stars are replaced by the ASL alphabet. Below, the text reads: “BEFORE DISABILITY: A History of American Citizenship. Sari Altschuler”

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

So excited to see this collaboration with brilliant colleagues published in the Lancet today! Here's our discussion of the humanities skills (esp. narrative + editing) healthcare practitioners will need in the age of AI scribes. @iandarin.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social

Clinician as editor: notes in the era of AI scribes
Every clinician has a strategy. Between patients, before going home, late at night—clinical notes must be written. They are essential for recording patient visits, ensuring continuity of care, arriving at accurate diagnoses, and facilitating communication between doctors, as well as providing medico-legal protection and enabling reimbursement. But these notes are increasingly burdensome to write, thanks in part to the electronic health record (EHR). Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes—computational systems that record clinical encounters and produce narrative summaries—promise much-needed help. Indeed, in many settings, health-care organisations are already adopting this technology. Nevertheless, AI scribes arrive at a moment when the note has already been changing, with legislation
increasingly granting patients access to their medical records.
Given AI scribes’ promised disruption, it is crucial to consider
what clinical notes are and what we want them to be.
Both the clinical encounter and the record of it are fundamentally narrative affairs: the clinical encounter unfolds as a story and the note documents that story. Early 19th-century patient records were long, detailed narratives about particular patients and their histories. But these records promise and limitations.
became increasingly succinct. Forms replaced paragraphs, and shared terminology replaced personal anecdotes; as historian practice of narrative medicine. John Harley Warner explains, there was a shifting “narrative preference for what was universal and precise over what was This trend continues in notes today with their dispassionate style and specialised terminology, ready to be packaged for health-care coders and billers.
A few decades ago, efforts to recentre narrative, especially narrative medicine and narrative-based medicine, emerged to address the depersonalised style of modern medicine exemplified by such notes. So much of medicine i…

biases—particularly troubling given medicine’s ongoing research and care disparities. AI-generated summaries can also hallucinate details, making up disturbing interactions if words or phrases resemble training data patterns and inserting inaccuracies. AI can introduce insensitive, incorrect, offensive, or stereotype-based language, gender misattribu- tion, and even diagnostic errors, a set of problems that will be magnified by automation bias—the bias to accept AI decisions and text as more authoritative than human ones.
There are also unique challenges posed by the clinical encounter for AI because of, as machine learning researcher Juan Quiroz and his team put it, the “complex nature of the clinical environment and clinical conversation”. In his experience as a practising clinician who is piloting an AI scribe, one of us (IH) has noticed that AI scribes can miss information from longitudinal clinician–patient relationships and non-verbal communication. They sometimes make speech-to-text transcription errors, confuse the clinician’s story with the patient’s, include details not appropriate to the EHR, use potentially judgemental language, omit important details, add plausible but incorrect information, and overstep their purview, making diagnostic suggestions rather than generating summary. Accents make the speech- to-text transcription less accurate. Most AI scribes today work in limited languages. Some of these issues may improve, but the fundamental problem remains: open notes emphasise notes as interpersonal narrative just as AI scribes seek to automate the task.
To counter these risks of automation, clinicians using AI scribes should view their new role as note editor—a transition best supported by training in editorial and narrative skills. Most immediately, seasoned clinicians will need to reduce transcription errors, odd word choices, extraneous details, and disclosures inappropriate for the record as well as adding missed details and often rewriting AI-ge…

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

Not everything you write feels equally good or important, but I’m really proud of this essay, which is probably the best thing I’ve ever written. (a little look into the book I'm finishing on disability, race, and citizenship) www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/core/journal...

This is a composite of three images. The top left shows a picture of the cover of PMLA (journal) with an orange flower. The bottom left image is the beginning of the notes section which features the thanks described above. And the right hand image features a hand on the first page with the title "Babo's 'Mute'-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America" followed by the first few paragraphs, which can be found at the link in the main post text.

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 02/12/2023

Americanist friends, look at this amazing Vietnamese- American Emerson by Tammy Nguyen on display right now at the ICA!

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 12/09/2023

We are delighted to announce the second Comparative Health Humanities symposium at Institut d'Études Avancées de Paris (hybrid) on October 5-6th.

The Symposium gathers prominent scholars from the US and France to examine what we can learn about the field across political, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Speakers will address topics including race/racism, Asian and African diasporas and health, the environment, data, and health, and health humanities and the health professions. We aim not only to surface differences but to develop a new model for thinking about the health humanities comparatively.
Speakers include
Eram Alam, Harvard University
Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University
Rita Charon, Columbia University
David Shumway Jones, Harvard University
Guillaume Lachenal, Sciences Po
Céline Lefève, Université Paris Cité
Solène Lellinger, Université Paris Cité
Chris Parsons, Northeastern University
Paul-André Rosental, Sciences Po
Karen Thornber, Harvard University
Sophie Vasset, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier
Jean-Christian Vinel, Université Paris Cité
Simeng Wang, CNRS
Patricia Williams, Northeastern University

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Sari Altschuler @sarialtschuler.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

Still new here, but I wanted to share here that Keywords for Health Humanities is out in the world! It's amazing to get to make the thing you believe should exist in the world, + I feel really proud to have shepherded these 65 wonderful essays into print with Priscilla Wald + Jonathan Metzl.

Left hand holds book in the sunshine. Top reads "keywords for health humanities." Bottom lists editors' names. White lettering on a deep blue-purple background. Book cover is cut by a middle panel with a wrench that appears to be slowly turning something.

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