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Dr. Thomas Maren

Narrative medicine is a new approach to optimizing communication between physician and patient. It also provides a means to train health care professionals in the healing arts and is, therefore, an approach that attempts to reverse historical trends in medical education and practice.

By training physicians to understand narrative structure and to see case histories as narratives, narrative medicine increases the physician’s ability to communicate with patients and to maximize the information acquired in an interview.

Dr. Leighton Cluff teaching at the bedside

Narrative medicine also encourages physicians to read literature and increase their understanding of the human condition, emphasizing the use of reflective writing as a means to develop empathy. Writing, and reading thus encourages the development of reflective practitioners who develop empathetic patient-physician relationships.

The speaker series brought in practitioners who developed narrative medicine as a discipline, who provide perspective on the development of modern medicine and who can provide insight into ways by which narrative competency can aid medical practice.

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Speakers:

Tod Chambers, Ph.D. : Narrative and Culture

Tod Chambers is assistant professor in the program of Medical Ethics and Humanities at Northwestern University. His background is comparative religion and cultural studies, with a special emphasis on Thai Buddhism. He has published extensively on the overlap between bioethics, literary theory, and cultural studies. He has a special interest in issues surrounding enhancement technologies in imaginative literature and in concepts of health and illness across cultures.

Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D. : Narrative Medicine: Equipment for Listening and Healing

Rita Charon is a general internist, literary scholar, and Director of the Program in Narrative medicine at Columbia University, New York. She has practiced internal medicine at Columbia for over 20 years, accompanying a patient panel of elderly, poor, sick women of color through much of what has befallen then. In completing a Ph.D. in English at Columbia, Dr. Charon has developed a proficiency as a narratologist, specializing in the works of Henry James. Her research over the years has examined how doctors and patients talk to one another, what happens when doctors permit themselves to write about patients, and how narrative competence can increase the effectiveness of medical care. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Literature and medicine, co-editor of an anthology on narrative ethics entitled Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics, and is now working on a book called Narrative Medicine.

Leighton Cluff, M.D.: On the Lost Art of Caring,

Dr Cluff received his degree in medicine from the George Washington University School of Medicine in 1949. After research training and a faculty appointment at Johns Hopkins he joined the faculty at the University of Florida COM, where he served as professor and chair of medicine for 10 years. He left Florida in 1976 and served as president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation until 1990. He worked on public health projects in developing countries, and served as a consultant for the WHO, FDA, Department of State, and NIH, as well as for the Defense Department on Bioterrorism issues. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has edited ten books, including books on long term care, home care, and, most recently, on crises in the physician-patient relationship that he defines as the Lost Art of Caring.

David Rothman, Ph.D. : The Doctor as Stranger?

David Rothman, professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Science and Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, specializes in social history and the history of medicine. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1958 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1964. His published works include The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971, 1990); Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (1980), The Willowbrook Wars (1984), Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision-making (1991), and Beginnings Count: The Technological Imperative in American Health Care (1997).

Pali Delevitt M.A.: Partners in Healing

Pali Delevitt is a consultant serving as Education Coordinator for the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine. Beginning in 1991, Pali designed and taught the program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. This innovative curriculum has served as a proto-type for other medical schools in the country. Pali is Director of the Global Medicine Education Program: An Introduction to theWorld's Healing Traditions, a nationally offered, full month residential rotation for fourth year medical students. In addition, she facilitates local and national retreats for medical students, focusing on the development of Humanism in Medicine and The Inner Life of the Healer. She is a national speaker and presenter; her programs include "Listening Medicine," "Human Touch, Healing Touch," "The Sacred Contract: The Doctor, the Patient and the Soul," and "Women As Healer; the Influence of the Feminine in Medicine." Pali is a three-time cancer survivor, who has consciously integrated conventional medicine with complementary therapies for her successful recovery.

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