Special Announcements
Literature & Medicine has just completed its 10th year!
When the Maine Humanities Council first began the Literature & Medicine program at Eastern Maine Medical Center (Bangor, 1997) and Mayo Regional Hospital (Dover-Foxcroft, 1998), we had little idea that the program would be going strong in health care facilities in 19 states 10 years later. Tom Lizotte, Director of Marketing and Development and the liaison for Mayo Regional, was initially uncertain that the program would work. Reflecting back, he writes:
“When I was approached about starting a book discussion group at Mayo Regional Hospital, I was skeptical that we could pull it off. Would there be enough interest at our small community hospital in rural Dover-Foxcroft, and would the staff be willing to step out of their usual roles and take a fresh look at themselves and their patients?
I clearly underestimated the hunger for intellectual stimulation. The answers: yes and yes. Ten years later, Lit & Med is an institution at Mayo, and the pure pleasure of reading and discussing literature has warmed many a cold winter’s evening here.”
Welcome to new state partners
Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Hawai’i, Nebraska and Virginia are the most recent states to offer Literature & Medicine. Read about what is happening in these and other partner states in National Connections.
Quantifying the Power and Pleasure of Ideas: A New Approach to Evaluating the Literature & Medicine Program by Brita Zitin
Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® is a reading and discussion program for medical professionals that, as one participant writes, “renews the heart and soul of health care.” Program participants work in all aspects of patient care, and include nurses, physicians, support and allied staff, administrators, clergy, social workers, and therapists, in hospital, home health, hospice and public health settings. The opportunity for these professionals to talk about their work with colleagues is rare, and the effects of bringing them together to reflect on lived experience through the lens of literature are often profound. ::: read the whole article
Imagine What Its Like, our Literature & Medicine anthology, will be published in late 2007
For over eight years, Ruth Nadelhaft, a longtime Literature & Medicine facilitator and retired professor of English from the University of Maine, has carefully read hundreds, if not thousands, of short stories, poems, essays and personal narratives as a facilitator for three different L&M groups. She drew upon this experience as she edited the Maine Humanities Council’s upcoming publication, Imagine What It’s Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology. The readings she has gathered illuminate the experience of illness, treatment, death, dying and caregiving from a variety of viewpoints. They are also unusually diverse, including poetry, prose and drama selected to foster reflection and understanding about the human dimensions of health care.
Why create our own anthology?
Literature & Medicine groups are always searching for meaningful readings and often have tight budgets. A good anthology is a tremendous resource, and can help facilitators and group members explore readings they might not otherwise find. Although there are many literature and medicine anthologies available, Imagine What It’s Like is different because it deliberately reflects the range of readings we hope Literature & Medicine groups will include. It combines a diversity of voices, including wide representation of—and from—a variety of health care professionals and people of diverse backgrounds, situations and conditions.
With support from Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Morton Family Foundation, NEH and the Hawai’i Humanities Council, the University of Hawai’i Press will publish the anthology in late 2007. We at the Maine Humanities Council are grateful to Craig Howes, Director of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i for his help and interest in the project.
Check the Maine Humanities Council web site in the fall for more information and to order copies. We hope to have the anthology ready for the November conference.
Wondering what the anthology will include? Here is a small sampling, with brief annotations by editor Ruth Nadelhaft:
Rafael Campo writes as a gay man and a doctor who practiced throughout the most devastating years of the AIDS deaths in San Francisco.
William Cowper, the 19th century English poet, was a life-long sufferer from depression… [His] images communicate the urgent nature of the suicidal yearning that may characterize acute depression.
Cortney Davis has done invaluable work as a nurse, poet and anthologist…She writes in a confessional and yet dispassionate tone of the nurse’s experience, revealing the delights and the costs in the same spare, honest cadences.
Anita Endrezze’s short story immerses the reader in the experience of a Native American healing tradition. The pace of the story conveys the immensely long and deep natural tradition that underlies the life work of one aging healer. The story conveys, as well, the changes in the world that will render his healing obsolete.
4th Literature & Medicine Summer Institute draws participants from across the country
Literature & Medicine enthusiasts from across the country converged at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine last June for our fourth Literature & Medicine Summer Institute. The Maine Humanities Council created these Institutes so all involved in organizing Lit & Med programs will have the training they need to host a program. As the program grows, the Institutes have become a critical way to ensure that its goals and high standards are maintained. The Institutes also help those new to the program benefit from others’ experiences. ::: read the whole article
Lit & Med in the News!
Read the Chicago Tribune’s health feature story about the Lit & Med program published on May 1, 2007: “Book club good medicine for patients, physicians” by Barbara Brotman, Chicago Tribune staff reporter.