Ricardo Nuila, M.D. ‘06, is a practicing internal medicine doctor and hospitalist serving at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston, Texas. He serves as an associate professor of medicine, medical ethics and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Nuila also is the director of the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab program at Baylor, which develops educational materials and experiences that weave the arts and humanities into medical education.
Over his career as a practicing physician, Dr. Nuila’s first-hand experiences have fueled his writing on health disparities, healthcare policy and the interface between art and medicine.
He has contributed to a number of publications, including Texas Monthly, VQR, The New York Times Sunday Review, The Atlantic.com and The New England Journal of Medicine. He also covered Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic for The New Yorker. His short stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology as well as in McSweeney’s and other literary magazines.
His striking debut, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, was published in March 2023 by Scribner. It details the poignant stories of five Houstonians who, facing a broken healthcare system, turn to their last option – Ben Taub Hospital.
