Founder of narrative medicine to speak on how the
humanities can improve medical practice, Oct. 15, in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 4,
2018) — Rita Charon, scholar, physician, and originator of the burgeoning field
of narrative medicine, will deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture in the
Humanities.
The lecture is the highest honor
the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in
the humanities.
The National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH), a federal agency created in 1965, selects the lecturer
through a formal review process that includes nominations from the general
public. NEH awards more than $120 million in annual grants that support
understanding and appreciation of cultural topics including art, ethics, history,
languages, literature, law, music, philosophy, religion, and others. The
Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is the agency’s signature annual public
event.
Charon will deliver the lecture,
titled “To See the Suffering: The Humanities Have What Medicine Needs,” on
Monday, October 15, at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., at 7:30 p.m. The
lecture is free and open to the public and will stream online at neh.gov.
Tickets to the lecture are free of charge and distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets will be available starting on Wednesday, September 19, at www.neh.gov or (202) 606-8340.
“In her pioneering work in
narrative medicine, Rita Charon has shown the amazing power of the humanities
in healing both mind and body,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “She has
played an essential role in reminding us that the humanities also enrich the
lives of caregivers, not just their patients. Her scholarship gets to the very
core of the human condition.”
A Harvard-trained physician with
a PhD in English literature, Charon is the founding Chair and Professor of
Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor of Medicine at the Columbia
University Irving Medical Center. The new department is home to the discipline
of narrative medicine, which seeks to improve patient care by putting the act
of storytelling at the heart of medical practice. Medical students and health care
professionals in the program learn from models of literature, creative writing,
and literary theory how to elicit and interpret patients’ stories in order to
treat the whole person.
The practice of narrative
medicine, Charon has said, helps health care professionals develop a tolerance of
uncertainty, improves the functioning of health care teams, decreases
professional burnout, and deepens understanding between patients and their
doctors. “To talk with a seriously ill person about his or her near future
brings both conversationalists straight toward what it means to be alive,”
Charon wrote in 2017. Her work in narrative medicine has been recognized by the
Association of American Medical Colleges, the American College of Physicians,
the Society for Health and Human Values, and the Society of General Internal
Medicine.
Charon is the recipient of a
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residence and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work
has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A 2003
NEH grant supported curriculum development by Charon and her colleagues, who
explored the potential benefits of bringing literary and creative processes to
medical education.
A general internist who has
practiced primary care medicine at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City,
Charon teaches at Columbia University in both the Vagelos College of Physicians
and Surgeons and on the Arts & Sciences campus. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford
University Press, 2006), co-author of Principles and Practice of
Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2017), and co-editor of
Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY
Press, 2008) and Stories Matter: The Role
of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, 2002). She completed an
MD at Harvard in 1978 and a PhD in English at Columbia in 1999, concentrating
on the works of Henry James.
NEH’s Jefferson Lecture is the Endowment’s most widely
attended annual event. Past Jefferson
Lecturers include Martha C. Nussbaum, Ken Burns,
Anna Deavere Smith, Walter Isaacson, Martin Scorsese, Wendell Berry, Drew
Gilpin Faust, John Updike, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Morrison, James McPherson, Barbara Tuchman, and Robert Penn Warren. The
lectureship carries a $10,000 honorarium, set by statute.
Engage or follow the
Jefferson Lecture social conversation:
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Humanities
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and Instagram: @NEHgov | #jefflec18
National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
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