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A newsletter from the Division of Medical Humanities
at NYU Langone Health
November 16, 2018

How Storytelling Can Help Young Doctors Become More Resilient

Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH, reflects on how the use of stories can help doctors process challenging experiences, increase empathy, enhance wellness and resilience, and promote a more humanistic health care culture.

The Magic Shop of the Brain

Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and how we can reshape our lives and perhaps our species through the scientific and human understanding we are now gaining.

British Doctors To Prescribe Arts & Culture to Patients

An ambitious initiative unveiled recently by British Health Secretary Matt Hancock may soon enable the country’s doctors to prescribe therapeutic art- or hobby-based treatments for ailments ranging from dementia to psychosis, lung conditions and mental health issues.

Geographies of Medical and Health Humanities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation

The latest issue of GeoHumanities "brings together practitioners and theorists working broadly in medical health humanities, asking them both to consider their work as temporally and spatially located and to position their practices in conversation with a growing uptake of humanities methods and methodologies in other disciplines."

Highlights from
Division of Medical Humanities Projects

BLR's New Theme Issue: "Dis/Placement"

BLR's latest theme issue explores the idea of displacement, drawing from stories that range from the personal to the political, and from the familiar to the foreign. One standout poem is Gaetan Sgro’s "Reasons for Admission," which movingly maps out the ways that hospitalization is a contradictory and fracturing experience.

Annotation Roundup: National Diabetes Month

As November is National Diabetes Month, here is a look at some entries on the NYU Langone LitMed Database that feature diabetes in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction: "Diabetes" by James Dickey (poem); Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes by Lisa Roney (nonfiction); and Sugar Isn't Everything by Willo Davis Roberts (YA fiction).



NYU Langone's Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care Takes Part in Reimagine End of Life New York

Megan Rau, MD, MPH, a physician in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care at NYU Langone, performed a narrative piece at The Nocturnists—a live storytelling event where doctors and health professionals share stories of joy, sorrow, and self-discovery—on Tuesday, October 30th at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. The event was part of a larger partnership with Reimagine, a week-long, city-wide event series that explores the subject of death and dying through art, performance, and design. The Division also sponsored a film screening and talk with Jessica Zitter, MD, on End of Life issues as part of Reimagine.

Colleen Farrell, a resident physician in internal medicine at NYU and Bellevue Hospital, and Maureen Miller, a graduate of NYU School of Medicine who is now a fellow in transfusion medicine at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, were also part of the talented lineup of storytellers at The Nocturnists event.

Calls for Submission & Other Opportunities

2019 Pearl Birnbaum Hurwitz Humanism in Healthcare Award
Do you know a remarkable woman who exemplifies humanism in the healthcare arena? The Arnold P. Gold Foundation is seeking nominations for the 2019 Pearl Birnbaum Hurwitz Humanism in Healthcare Award, now until December 7. This prestigious award is presented annually to a woman who has demonstrated the values of humanism, empathy and compassion in her work with underserved or marginalized populations in the healthcare arena. The award is open to professionals in any field who impact the health of the people they work with (i.e., healthcare professionals, social workers, educators, policy makers, researchers, activists, etc.). More information.

Two Full-time Faculty Positions in the Narrative Medicine Master's Program at Columbia University

  • Columbia University School of Professional Studies (SPS), in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), invites applications for full-time positions at the rank of Lecturer in Discipline to teach in SPS’s MS Program in Narrative Medicine, CSER’s undergraduate and MA programs and ICLS’s Program in “Medicine, Literature, and Society.” This is a full-time appointment with multi-year renewal contingent on successful review which will begin on January 1 or July 1, 2019. For more information and a detailed position description, please see the full position announcement here.
  • Columbia University School of Professional Studies (SPS) invites applications for full-time positions at the rank of Lecturer in Discipline or Senior Lecturer in Discipline to teach in the Narrative Medicine Master of Science degree program. This position will begin on July 1, 2019. This is a full-time appointment with multi-year renewal contingent on successful review. For more information and a detailed position description, please see the full position announcement here.
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Events

NOV
23

How 200 Years of Death in Greenwich Village Changed America

NOV
28

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks: On Social Justice, Race and Health

NOV
28

Disease and Disparity: Realities of the Uneven Playing Field of Public Health
NOV
28

Lan Li - Building Bodies on Paper: The Curiosity of Meridians & Neurophysiology
DEC
6

The House of God at 40: Healing Then and Now

Please join us at NYU Langone Health to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the most influential medical novels of the modern era, The House of God by Samuel Shem, MD.
DEC
10

Something The Lord Made

A screening of the award-winning film Something The Lord Made, followed by a presentation by Harriet Washington & Robert Ruben, MD. At the New York Academy of Medicine.
DEC
12-
15

Nervous/System

Interactive media artist Andrew Schneider and collaborators create a performance cartography of the all-too-fleeting stories and revelations flooding our bodies and brains every second of every day.
MAR
28

The Environments of the Health Humanities: Inquiry and Practice

Health Humanities Consortium Annual Conference
March 28-30, 2019 | Chicago
Thru
APR
28

Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis

At the Museum of the City of New York.

There will be no newsletter next week. The next edition will appear on November 30.
"The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think."    – Leonard Bernstein

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