Conferences and Training
The Maine Humanities Council periodically organizes conferences to bring the literature and medicine community together. Conferences include the upcoming “After Shock: Humanities Perspectives on Trauma” (November 2010) and “Caring for the Caregiver,” held in 2007.
MHC also offers Literature & Medicine institutes and trainings to provide a thorough introduction to the program, its goals, and the nuts & bolts of organizing it. These are open to anyone interested in learning more, and are required for those new to organizing or facilitating the program.
Upcoming Conference
An innovative conference for health care professionals who work with veterans and others who have experienced trauma. Discover literature’s ability to provide new insights into trauma’s effects on your patients—and to sustain you as you care for them.
The goal of the conference is to introduce a range of humanities programs, including Literature & Medicine, that can be used to support health care professionals who are caring for patients who have undergone trauma, in particular combat trauma, and who may have vicariously or directly experienced trauma themselves. Our keynote speaker, Jonathan Shay, M.D., [bio] former VA psychiatrist and MacArthur “Genius” Award-winning author, epitomizes this approach. Shay’s books about his work with Vietnam veterans demonstrate the continuing relevance of ancient texts to our understanding of war and its costs to our warriors. In Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, Shay weaves together contemporary experience and thousand-year-old stories to illuminate issues of trauma and recovery, anger and betrayal and the difficulties of homecoming. These books, and their sources, are used frequently in Literature & Medicine, and have been invaluable in helping health care providers better understand and treat the psychic wounds that many of their patients have suffered.
In addition to Dr. Shay’s keynote, we will have other plenary speakers and a wide variety of smaller, interactive breakout sessions TBA.
Upcoming Training
There will be a special training Nov. 11, 2010 in Washington, D.C. in conjunction with the conference, After Shock: Humanities Perspectives on Trauma.
Podcasts
Hear talks and presentations by four leaders in the literature and medicine movement—Veneta Masson, Rita Charon, Judy Schaefer and Rafael Campo—given at Literature & Medicine’s first national conference, Caring for the Caregiver: Perspectives in Literature and Medicine, November 2007.
