Caring for the Caregiver:
Perspectives on Literature and Medicine
A National Conference November 9 & 10, 2007
by Lizz Sinclair ::: bio

Literature & Medicine is convening leaders from the burgeoning literature and medicine movement for our first national conference on November 9 & 10, 2007, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Caring for the Caregiver: Perspectives on Literature and Medicine will focus on one particular feature of the literature and medicine movement: its attention to the support and care of caregivers themselves. Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine program will be among the major initiatives featured, along with Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®, and Medical Readers’ Theatre.

Victoria Bonebakker, Director of Literature & Medicine and Associate Director of the Maine Humanities Council, is excited about the conference. “It will be a wonderful opportunity for all of us to learn more about how literature and writing have and can support health care professionals. We have fabulous, thoughtful keynote speakers whose work has been foundational to the field, joined by a number of other wonderful presenters who will talk about their innovative work. We see this as a major step in encouraging the development of many new literature and writing programs around the country. Both literature and writing have proved themselves as important ingredients in helping many health care professionals recover meaning and satisfaction in their work.”

In addition to workshops on literature and writing programs, there will be sessions on research and evaluation, and on strategies to successfully position literature and writing programs in hospital and hospice, medical education, social service and other health care organizations.

Equally exciting will be the opportunity for conference participants to meet other health care professionals and educators from across the country who are interested and excited about learning ways to integrate literature and writing with the practice of health care. The conference will be a rejuvenating experience, and will give health care professionals tools for reflecting on their experiences and caring for themselves amidst the great pressures inherent in caring for others.

The conference is taking place near a major airport with discount carriers to make travel easy and relatively inexpensive. We hope that you will join us, and help us to spread the word. We promise you will leave both informed and inspired!

Speakers

Rafael Campo, M.D., an award-winning poet and essayist, will be a keynote speaker and will also lead a workshop. He teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his practice serves mostly Latinos, gay / lesbian / bisexual / transgendered people and people with HIV infection. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and essays, including The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire; Landscape with Human Figure and The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Favorite Poems. He writes about this in many of his essays and poems and regularly shares poetry with patients as another way of communicating with them, inviting deeper discussions about their lives and conditions. (Rafael Campo was interviewed in our first edition of Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine. You can read it here.)

Rita Charon M.D., Ph.D. will also speak and will lead a Narrative Medicine writing workshop. She is the Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. A well respected leader in the literature and medicine movement, Charon is a general internist who, early in her career, realized the importance of listening expertly and attentively to the complicated narratives related by her patients “in words, gestures, silences, tracings, images ...—and to cohere all these stories into something that made...enough sense...to be acted on.” She studied literature to learn how stories are built, told and interpreted, and from there began writing about her patients to better understand what they were telling her. She sometimes shares her writing with her patients asking, “Did I get it straight?, opening deeper dialogue with them. Through her Narrative Medicine Program, Charon guides medical students, colleagues and a wide range of health care professionals in writing reflectively about their practices not only to more accurately understand what their patients are experiencing, but also “what they themselves endure in the care of the sick.” (see our interview with her in this edition of Synapse).

Anne Fadiman will speak about her book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. This is a pivotal text in the literature and medicine field because of its careful examination of the interactions and clashes of cultures that occur when a Hmong family turns to the western medical system as their daughter’s epilepsy becomes severe. This book, which is an account of these actual events, offers readers the opportunity to step into the shoes of all those involved—the family, social workers, physicians, nurses and others—and examine the conflicting cultural lenses through which each viewed the young girl’s condition. The New York Times wrote that “Ms. Fadiman tells her story with a novelist’s grace, playing the role of cultural broker, comprehending those who do not comprehend each other and perceiving what might have been done or said to make the outcome different.”

Join in the conversations and take away ideas of ways you can incorporate literature, writing and discussion into your life and and your workplace. Visit our website to register and to find more information.

What would you like future feature articles to explore? Send us your ideas! Email Lizz Sinclair.

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