Raj Telhan

Raj Telhan is a physician and writer who works at the intersection of literature, medicine, and culture. His writing appears in VQR and the American Scholar. His honors include the Smith-Shanubi Scholarship at the New York State Writers Institute and the VQR Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction. Telhan studied Literature and Medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was a Crispell Scholar.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2022

The Patient Will See You Now

By Raj Telhan , Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz

As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...

HUMAN PRACTICE / Spring 2022

Hunger Games

By Raj Telhan , Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz

Near the end of the hellish first year of the coronavirus pandemic, I was possessed by the desire to eliminate sugar—all refined sugar—from my diet. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best time to add a new challenge to the mix of mayhem...

HUMAN PRACTICE / Fall 2021

Mutations

By Raj Telhan , Illustration by Lauren Simkin Berke

Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just...

HUMAN PRACTICE / Summer 2021

What Is Found There

By Raj Telhan , Illustrations by Julianna Brion

Unlike professional wellness culture, humanistic study can be a balm to the soul and giver of durable self-knowledge. But what would this self-knowledge look like in actual clinical practice? What would the hazards be?

ESSAYS / Winter 2018

Foreign Bodies

By Raj Telhan , Illustrations by Stephen Doyle

As reproductive technology outpaces US immigration law, families struggle to stay together.

MEMOIR / Fall 2015

Begin Cutting

By Raj Telhan

Everywhere in the bleached walls of the laboratory—the sterile linoleum flooring, the burnished metal of dissection tables, the zippered white bags used to veil the dead, the gleaming instruments used to cut them open—I saw the landscape of...