Show Notes
Prof Ian Sabroe and Dr Dieter Declercq talk to Prof Rita Charon about her pioneering work in narrative medicine, as well as the pivotal role of aesthetics and aesthetic experiences in the practices of narrative medicine.
Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar who originated the field of narrative medicine. She is Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. She completed the MD at Harvard in 1978 and the PhD in English at Columbia in 1999, concentrating on narratology and the works of Henry James. Her research focuses on the consequences of narrative medicine practice, narrative medicine pedagogy, and health care team effectiveness. At Columbia, she directs the Foundations of Clinical Practice faculty seminar, the Virginia Apgar Academy for Medical Educators, the Narrative and Social Medicine Scholarly Projects Concentration Track, the required and elective Narrative Medicine curriculum for the medical school, and Columbia Commons: Collaborating Across Professions, a medical-center-wide partnership devoted to health care team effectiveness. She inaugurated and teaches in the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program at Columbia. She has lectured and served as Visiting Professor at many medical schools and universities in the US and abroad, teaching narrative medicine theory and practice. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, and research funding from the NIH, the NEH, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, and several additional private foundations. She was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” Dr. Charon has published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Narrative, Henry James Review, Poetics Today, The Drama Review, Partial Answers, and Literature and Medicine. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002) and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY Press, 2008).
More from Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq will with Danielle about Why Doctors Write, alongside the encounter between arts and medicine, and the doctor-patient connection. Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is one of the foremost voices in the medical world today, shining an unflinching light on the realities of healthcare and speaking passionately about the doctor patient relationship. She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection. Her writing appears in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic, as well as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Danielle Ofri is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bellevue Literary Review, the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting, now an award-winning, independent nonprofit literary arts organization. She is a primary care internist at Bellevue Hospital and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU. Her lectures to medical and general audiences are renowned for her use of dramatic stories (and avoidance of PowerPoint). Her essays have been selected for Best American Essays (twice) and Best American Science Writing, by Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, and Susan Orlean. Ofri is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2023 Davies Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, the 2022 National Humanism in Medicine Medal from the Gold Foundation, the 2020 Global Listening Legend Award, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Ofri is a “Master” of the American College of Physicians, and has received the McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.” Danielle Ofri has given TED talks on Deconstructing Perfection and Fear: A Necessary Emotion, and has also performed stories for the Moth. She is featured in the documentaries Why Doctors Write and White Coat Rebels. An ever-struggling student of the cello, she’s hoping to someday complete the ever-uphill slog through all 36 movements of the Bach cello suites.
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Cathy, Jason and Phil about Personalised and public health: learning (and not learning) from the past. Our guests share a research interest around public health, personalised health, the politics of health, but have different disciplinary training. During the conversation, we tease out some of the similarities but also differences between past and present, and a humanities versus biomedical approach. We explore what can we learn from each other across disciplinary approaches, and from the past to inform approaches to population health today.
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Martina about appliedness and medical education, medical humanities and (the lack of) defined disciplinary identity, and how the medical humanities interact with multiple academic disciplines in research and teaching.
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Stella and Neil about Care. Key themes include: the place of self-care in contemporary writing and medical humanities; theories of care in the medical humanities and further afield; the relationship of care to narratives of illness and disability; care deficits and the long shadow that they cast in illness narratives. Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Health and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Brill/Rodopi, 2011) and of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and has led “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities”, an interdisciplinary project that examined how books, art and healthcare can be interrelated. Current research includes a practice-based project that uses creative methods inspired by the artist’s book to explore the experiences of mothers affected by historic and contemporary practices of child removal and adoption, and a new monograph on self-care in contemporary writing.
Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Ben andJohn about Queer Medical Humanities. Key themes include:queer inclusivity in hospitals and hospital design, knowledge in healthcare and, issues of healthcare delivery, queer methodologies for healthcare futures andpoliticisation of health and queer healthcare. Dr Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in theSchool of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. He works at the intersections of French Studies and the Medical Humanities, exploring how contemporary Frenchand Francophone literature, film and philosophy dialogue with biomedical science and different healthcare contexts. His current work maps contemporary philosophical approaches to the hospital, and he has published on newconceptions for clinical environments emerging in the works of Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul B. Preciado, and Anne Dufourmantelle. He has a particular interest in LGBTQIA+ inclusivity in healthcare and hospital design,and is currently working on a project about queering the hospital.