Kathryn Montgomery is Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics, Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Program at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.
While an English professor at Morehouse College in the 1970s, she joined that institution’s Medical Education Project as chair of the Taskforce for Interfacing the Social Sciences and Humanities with the Medical Curriculum. Before moving to Northwestern in 1988, she was Director of the Division of the Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. With grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, she has written about literature and medicine, the epistemology of medicine, and the use of literature in medical education. She is the author of Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1991) and How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2006).