Visual Rx 11 ｜A Note on Where Visual Rx Is Going
A short update on the next phase of the project
This month, I graduated from the MSc in Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UAB / VHIR. It felt like a natural moment to pause and look back at where Visual Rx has actually gone.
Over the past months, this project has moved through more than one shift.
It began as something close to self-observation: a photograph, a small pause, a question about what the body already knows before language catches up. The subject of that attention was always me — my own body, my own clinical memory, my own displacement as a nurse who left clinical work, moved countries, and began again in another language.
Along the way, the method itself kept expanding. What counted as a visual prescription grew from curated photographs to any visible trace of effort — a crossed-out word, a corrected note. And whose body the method was designed to read grew too: from the patient to the caregiver, asking what a body trained by years of clinical work still carries, long after the shift has ended.
Then, a few pieces ago, something changed more fundamentally.
For the first time, Visual Rx turned toward someone else’s experience instead of my own. I began asking other people — a local resident describing his relationship to hospitals and waiting rooms, a researcher describing the line between clinical training and a career built in a lab — the same kinds of questions I had been asking my own body for years.
This turn matters, and I do not think I fully understood its weight until I was already in the middle of it.
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Reading my own body carries a certain kind of safety: whatever I choose to expose, whatever conclusions I draw, the consequences are mine alone to hold. Reading someone else’s body and memory is a different responsibility altogether.
It raises a question the earlier pieces never had to face:
When is it appropriate to name something in another person’s account that they have not fully named themselves, and when is the more honest choice simply to let their words stand as they are?
I do not have a complete answer to that yet. But sitting with these interviews has clarified one working principle I want to carry forward:
the right to interpret has to be earned by what the material itself reveals, not assumed in advance by the person asking the questions.
That is the phase Visual Rx is entering now — closer to method than memoir, more interested in how to responsibly read another person’s embodied account than in adding more of my own reflections to the record.
The next step is to take this more seriously as a method, not just a series of essays. I am working on shaping it into a piece written for a medical humanities and narrative medicine audience — something that lays out the method’s development, its ethical questions, and where it might go next, in a more formal register than these Medium posts allow.
In the meantime, Visual Rx will continue as a public writing project, with fuller reflections mostly published in Chinese on WeChat and selected updates here in English.
If you work in narrative medicine, caregiver wellbeing, patient experience, nursing humanities, arts-based research, or cross-cultural health, I would be glad to connect. This next phase is exactly the kind of work I would like to think through with others.
Visual Rx is an ongoing project at the intersection of photography, embodied cognition, nursing humanities, and narrative medicine.
FEI (Sofie) SHI
MSc Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship, UAB / VHIR
