Jul 2, 2007 -- Doctors and scientists in training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine are discovering that creative expression can be the best form of medicine for their crowded schedules. More than 50 faculty members, students, and staff have published the fruits of their creative talents in the spring issue of Ad Libitum.

Now in its fifth year, the latest issue of the college’s art and literary journal brims with colorful paintings, dramatic photographs, poems, and stories, both light-hearted and serious.

“Despite the demands from professional and everyday life, there are so many talented artists and writers in the college,” said the journal’s editor, Soumit Roy, a fourth-year PhD student and a sculptor.

The magazine—whose name means “at the discretion of the performer”—introduces members of the Einstein community to the talents of their colleagues, Mr. Roy said.

Each year, some 650 issues of the magazine are printed and distributed throughout the campus. Ad Libitum is produced by a staff of eight students and was co-founded by former students Drs. Tara Vijayan and Souvik Sarkar.

Inspiration comes equally from patients—as with a story by Steven A. Sparr, MD, professor of clinical neurology, about his attempt to coax an elderly patient with breast cancer to eat his homemade chicken soup—as it does from life away from the hospital. There are love poems and nature poems, photos of wildlife and exotic locales. A highlight of the issue is a series of photographs of Navajo Indians taken by Jonathan Wittenberg in the 1950s and published in his book, Navajo Nation 1950: Traditional Life in Photographs.

Mr. Roy, who has upgraded the magazine’s graphic quality and expanded its roster of contributors to include individuals from Jacobi and Montefiore medical centers, notes that the increasingly popular journal has been warmly supported by the Einstein administration.

“The magazine has become an integral part of the school,” Dr. Sarkar, outgoing executive editor who starts his residency at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx this fall, said.

Mixing medicine with the arts is not a new concept, said Allen M. Spiegel, the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean of Einstein. “One need only recall that Chekhov was a physician and Maugham a medical student[…] to appreciate how literature and medicine can be intertwined.”