The Clearings of Narrative Medicine, or How the Sick and Those Who Care for Them Can Unite
A lecture by
Dr. Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D.
Thursday, February 17th, 6:00-7:30 PM
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro CEPSR Building
513 W. 120th St, New York, NY 10025
This lecture will describe the emergence of narrative medicine at Columbia and the uses to which it has been put. By describing some of the clinical routines, training consequences, and on-going scholarly projects of narrative medicine, Dr. Charon will try to convey the visions of narrative medicine’s collaborative and relational practice of health care.
Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine. She is a general internist in practice in the Associates of Internal Medicine in Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Charon graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1978 and trained in internal medicine at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Hospital in New York. She completed the Ph.D. in the Department of English of Columbia in 1999, writing on the late works of Henry James and on literary analyses of medical texts. In 2000, she founded and now directs the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia.
Dr. Charon has designed and directed Columbia’s teaching programs in medical interviewing, humanities and medicine, and narrative medicine. She teaches in Columbia’s English department as well. She has published and lectured extensively in medical and literary journals on linguistic studies of doctor-patient conversations, narrative competence in physicians and medical students, narrative ethics, and empathy in medical practice. With the Core Faculty in Narrative Medicine at Columbia, she inaugurated the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine at Columbia in 2009, the first graduate program of its kind. Dr. Charon has been honored with a Kaiser Faculty Scholar Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple clinical and literary awards and honors. Her research has been supported by the NIH, the NEH, and several private foundations. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. She is working on a book on Henry James.
All CSSR Seminars are free and open to the public.
Pre-registration for this event at http://cssr.ei.columbia.edu/?id=rsvp is optional but recommended.
The CSSR Spring 2011 Seminar Series is offered with the support of the Earth Institute and Portales Partners, LLC.
