Susan E. Bell, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology, A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine Workshop: Art and Meaning in the World of Health Care

Susan joined the faculty of Bowdoin College, in 1983, after completing doctoral work in Sociology at Brandeis University and postdoctoral work in the Department of Psychiatry (Massachusetts Mental Health Center) at Harvard Medical School. Her courses cover the sociology of health and illness, chronic illness and disability, global health, and constructions of the body. Since 2000, she has also worked with the Maine Humanities Council to develop and lead six-month seminars in literature and medicine at hospitals and health centers in Maine. She is on the editorial board of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, and is editorial advisor for Sociology of Health & Illness.

Her current line of research explores works of art produced since the late 20th century by women who have had cancer. One set of questions asks what types of “work” these works of art do—for the artists, for viewers, for disease regimes, for social movements, for survival strategies—in/after treatments for cancer. She also considers how the artists address dilemmas of visibility as they move from the outside in and the inside out of their gendered bodies. Susan recently completed a collaborative project that explores the role of ’artworks’ produced by women with breast cancer in the context of breast cancer activism, “Artworks, collective experience, and claims for social justice: the case of women living with breast cancer,” with Alan Radley, Sociology of Health & Illness 29(3):366-390, 2007.

Another set of questions builds on earlier narrative studies of illness, and explores works of art as narratives, as in “Photo images: Jo Spence’s narratives of living with illness.” health, 6(1): 5-30, 2002. How can visual narratives deepen our sociological understandings of the ways individual experiences are shaped by the broader contexts in which they live, and in turn what possibilities for emancipation do they suggest? Her publications about this topic have given detailed attention to the works of conceptual artist Mary Kelly tracing her experiences of becoming a mother in the 1970s, photographer Jo Spence documenting her life with breast cancer from 1982-1992, and Martha Hall, making sense by making artist’s books after her diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989 until her death in 2003.

Susan recently completed a book manuscript, DES Daughters, Embodied Knowledge, and the Transformation of Women’s Health Politics in the Late Twentieth Century, which is currently under review.

All of these projects continue her longstanding scholarly interest and participation in women’s health activism; the production, contestation, and circulation of knowledges; and a recent turn to its performative aspects, as in “Vaginal politics: Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues,” with Susan M. Reverby, Women’s Studies International Forum, 28(5):430-444, 2005.

Marjorie Boyd, M.D. of the Maine Medical Center Residency Program Workshop: Two Successful Approaches to Incorporating the Humanities in the Education of Health Care Professionals

Marjorie Boyd is a hematologist who serves as the Medical Director of the Anticoagulation Clinic at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine. She is also a Clinical Associate Professor for the University of Vermont’s residency program, co-leads a reading and discussion group for residents, and serves as a mentor for the Chaplaincy Pastoral Education program. Marjorie has been a long-time supporter of Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® and has been instrumental in bringing the program to Maine Medical Center and to Mercy Hospital. Marjorie both helps organize the program and is an active participant.

Greg Burns, R.N.Nursing Coordinator, The JASON Program in Portland, Maine Workshop: Exploring Grief and Loss: A Reflective Conversation with an Interdisciplinary Panel of Hospice and Palliative Care Providers

Greg Burns has a long history of caring for seriously ill children and adults. After graduating with a B.S.N. in nursing from the University of Southern Maine, Greg worked on the medical-surgical ward at Maine Medical Center, where he developed an expertise in orthopedics. He transferred to the pediatric floor there out of his love of children, where his duties ranged from direct patient care to teaching, communication, and leadership. His close involvement with seriously ill and dying children led him to join the Maine Children’s Cancer Program in 1994. His skills there were many, but centered on delivering compassionate technical and psychosocial care. Greg worked with New England Life Care, providing home IV therapy for adults and children, and for Community Health Services as a Hospice/Palliative Care Nurse for adults and children. While at CHS he became a member of the Maternal Child Health Team. He is a member of the Medical Home Advisory Committee, The Maine Hospice Council Board of Directors, The Maine Hospice Council Retreat Team, Caring Resources for Living Board of Directors, and a reviewer/trainer for the End of Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) Pediatric Palliative Care Curriculum.

Betsy Burtis Manager of Training and Development, Southern New Hampshire Health System Workshop: The Art of Facilitating: A Look at Group Dynamics

Betsy Burtis is the Manager of Training and Development at a 188-bed hospital in New Hampshire. She is a voracious reader and a member of a book discussion group who believes that discussing issues in books allows people to share thoughts and information about themes that they might not be able to share or even articulate if it was their own personal experiences. She has been a liaison for the Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® program at her hospital.

Rafael Campo, M.F.A., Ph.D. National award-winning poet; faculty member and practitioner of general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Workshop: “Fact” vs. “Truth” in Narratives of Illness Speaking: Saturday, morning.

Rafael Campo was born in 1964 in Dover, New Jersey. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people, and people with HIV infection. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA program in creative writing.

He is the author of The Other Man Was Me (Arte Publico Press, Houston, 1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (W. IV. Norton, New York, 1997), a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal, which also won a Lambda Literary Award, for memoir.

His poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1995 (Scribner, New York, 1995), Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, New York, 1996), Currents in the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994), and Gay Men at the Millennium (Putnam, New York, 1997); and in numerous prominent periodicals, including DoubleTake, the Lancet, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Out, the Paris Review, The Progressive, Salon, Slate, the Threepenny Review, and the Washington Post Book World. His work has also been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts’ website and on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation. With the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, he wrote Diva (Duke University Press, 1999), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards for poetry. He is a recipient of the Annual Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has served as Visiting Writer at Amherst College and George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana.

He is currently serving as Fanny Hurst Visiting Poet at Brandeis University. He is also considered an important translator of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. His newest collection of poetry, The Enemy, was published in April 2007.

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. Professor of Clinical Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University; Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine Workshop: Narrative Medicine Writing Workshop
Speaking: Friday, morning.

Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine. She is a general internist in practice in the Associates of Internal Medicine in Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Charon graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1978 and trained in internal medicine at the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Hospital in New York. She completed the Ph.D. in the Department of English of Columbia in 1999, writing on the late works of Henry James and on literary analyses of medical texts. Dr. Charon has designed and directed Columbia’s teaching programs in medical interviewing, humanities and medicine, and narrative medicine and teaches seminars on the works of Henry James in Columbia’s English department. She has published and lectured extensively on linguistic studies of doctor-patient conversations, narrative competence in physicians and medical students, narrative ethics, and empathy in medical practice. Dr. Charon’s research has focused on doctor-patient communication, methods of teaching medical interviewing, and the outcomes of narrative training in medicine. She has held many leadership positions in her field both nationally and internationally and has published extensively.

Rita Charon was interviewed in our most recent edition of Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine. You can read it here.

Beth Ellers, M.D., M.P.H., M.F.A. Adjunct Faculty, Film studies; Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina. Workshop: Looking at Diversity through the Lens of Film

Beth Ellers is an Adjunct Faculty member of Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina where she teaches film studies. Before moving to North Carolina, Beth was a facilitator for two different hospitals hosting a Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® program in Maine. She also taught undergraduate film criticism courses in American Independent Film and Film Appreciation at the University of Southern Maine and was involved in designing curriculum development for behavioral medicine and medical humanities at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine. Beth also served as Director of Faculty Development at UNE, in charge of development, implementation, and teaching of faculty development workshop series to improve the teaching skills of community-based physicians and curriculum development, and taught medical humanities courses for medical students.

Beth has an MFA in Film Studies from the College of Communication at Boston University, where her coursework included American and International Film Criticism and History and Screenwriting. She was awarded the Fleder-Rosenberg Short Screenplay Contest by the college. She received an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health, where she concentrated on Maternal and Child Health, and received her MD from Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Bruce Clary, Ph.D. Evaluator, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®; Professor and Senior Research Associate for Public Policy and Management, Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine. Workshop: How to Show Results: Evaluative Design for Literature and Medicine Programs

Bruce Clary is the evaluator for the national program, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®. He is a Professor and Senior Research Associate for Public Policy and Management at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. Professor Clary graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California. He teaches Research Design, Evaluation Methods, Organizational Dynamics, and Managing in the Nonprofit Sector. His research focus is in program evaluation methods, organizational design issues in governmental and nonprofit service delivery, and citizen participation in a democratic society. He recently served as project director for Maine research conducted as part of a 50-state study of the role of faith-based organizations in the delivery of social services conducted by the Rockefeller Institute at SUNY-Albany. His current work includes an evaluation of a US Department of Education program, “Teaching American History,” for the Maine Humanities Council and on-going research in the United Kingdom and the United States on community currency systems. He is also working on a collaborative initiative between the American University in Bulgaria and the Muskie School.

Brita Zitin wrote about Bruce Clary’s methods, “Quantifying the Power and Pleasure of Ideas: A New Approach to Evaluating the Literature & Medicine Program” in our most recent edition of Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine. You can read the article here.

Anne Fadiman Author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Speaking: Saturday, noon.

Anne Fadiman is an award winning author, essayist, editor, and teacher. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, chronicles the trials of an epileptic Hmong child and her family living in Merced, California. Fadiman’s sensitive, incisive treatment of the unbreachable gulf between the Hmong and American medical systems won her a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The Washington Post called the book “an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.” The book continues to be taught at universities both as literary journalism and as a casebook for cross cultural sensitivity in general; it is also widely read by medical practitioners who wish to offer more effective care to patients from other cultures.

As the inaugural Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University’s first endowed appointment in nonfiction writing, Anne Fadiman serves as both a professor in the English department and a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.

Her best-selling essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is a book entirely about books—from the purchasing of them, to the reading of them, to the handling of them (always write in the margins; go ahead and crack the spines; pay no mind if you drop crumbs between the pages; shelve American literature alphabetically by author, English literature chronologically). The London Observer called Ex Libris “witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written.” It has been or will be translated into thirteen languages, including Korean and Catalan.

For seven years Anne Fadiman edited The American Scholar, the venerable literary quarterly, described by The New York Times as “an intellectual giant.” Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. She has won National Magazine Awards for both reporting and essays. Anne Fadiman is the editor of both the 2003 edition of Best American Essays and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005). A forthcoming essay collection, entitled At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, will be published in 2007.

Alyce Getler, Psy.D. Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Workshop: Medical Readers’ Theater

At Cambridge Health Alliance Alyce Getler is the chair of the Literature and Humanities Subcommittee of the Arts and Healthcare Steering Group. She has facilitated medical readers’ theater programs for residents, medical students, psychology interns, as well as faculty in psychiatry, nursing and medicine. She developed the “CHA Players” an interdisciplinary troupe of faculty and trainees interested in expanding the MRT program. As part of a year long fellowship program she studied the impact of medical readers’ theater on promoting empathy, broadening perspective and creating community among participants. Dr. Getler is a trained facilitator for the Literature and Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare program and has led seminars at Massachusetts General Hospital and Faulkner Hospital. She serves as the liaison for the CHA Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®.

Elizabeth Hart, M.D.Family physician/hospice and palliative physician at Maine General Health in Augusta, Maine Workshop: Exploring Grief and Loss: A Reflective Conversation with an Interdisciplinary Panel of Hospice and Palliative Care Providers

Elizabeth Hart, M.D., is a family physician with additional Board Certification in both Geriatrics and Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Her clinical practice at Maine General Health in Augusta focuses on caring for people with advanced dementia, primarily in nursing homes and at home. She is deeply committed to encouraging patients and their families to be active partners in their healthcare, to overcoming power imbalances in medicine and to bringing compassion to the institutionalized practice of medicine. She has taught Medical Humanities in health professions academic programs, has been an active supporter of the Maine Humanities Council’s Literature and Medicine Program since early in its planning process and has served as a facilitator of groups at two hospitals in Maine.

Ann Lemire, M.D. of the Maine Medical Center Residency Program Workshop: Two Successful Approaches to Incorporating the Humanities in the Education of Health Care Professionals

Ann Lemire is the Medical Director of the STD Clinic for the Public Health Department in Portland, Maine and is Clinical Assistant Professor for the Department of Family Practice at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington, VT. She has also served as the Program Director of the Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program at Maine Medical Center, where she co-led a reading and discussion group for residents, and served as the Medical Director of the Public Health Division focusing on health care for the homeless.

Martin Kohn, Ph.D.Co-founder and Senior Associate for Program Development Center for Literature, Medicine and Biomedical Humanities Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio Workshop: Two Successful Approaches to Incorporating the Humanities in the Education of Health Care Professionals

Martin Kohn directed the Human Values in Medicine program at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine for 20 years. His current interests are in the pedagogical aspects of the medical humanities and in developing transdisciplinary (literature, ethics, arts) performance pieces to engage professional and public communities in dialogue about the nature of our biotech/bioscience future. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and electronic journals.

David Loxterkamp, M.D.Family Physician in Belfast, Maine and author of A Measure of My Days. Workshop: Balance & Boundaries: Personal Reflections on the Professional Life

David Loxterkamp is a family physician who has lived and practiced in Belfast, Maine for 23 years. He is an occasional writer, teacher, and observer of everyday life, not least of all his own. His journal A Measure of My Days was published in 1997, and he has contributed to the The British Medical Journal, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other professional journals.

Veneta Masson, R.N., M.A. Washington, D.C. The author of the poetry collection, Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill, her new collection of poems is titled, Clinician’s Guide to the Soul. Workshop: Clinician’s Guide to the Soul

A nurse in practice for thirty-five years, twenty of them in primary health care, Veneta Masson was a founder, director and, for most of two decades, family nurse practitioner in a small, mom-and-pop clinic providing office and home care to an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, DC. Two books came out of that experience: Ninth Street Notebook—Voice of a Nurse in the City contains short pieces about big issues in health care from her vantage point on the front lines of health care. Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill is a poetry collection featuring narrative poems about events and people whose lives changed hers.

Though no longer in practice, Veneta continues to explore healing art. Her new poetry collection, Clinician’s Guide to the Soul, is scheduled for publication in 2008. She also serves as a Contributing Editor of the American Journal of Nursing.

Veneta Masson was interviewed in our second edition of Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine. You can read it here.

Kathryn Montgomery, Ph.D, Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics and of Medicine and Director, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Il. Workshop: What’s a Nice Discipline like Literature Doing in a Medical School?

Kathryn Montgomery is Professor of Medicine Humanities & Bioethics and Professor of Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Program.

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).

Elizabeth Motts Program Officer for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Workshop: How to Start a Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care Program at your Institution

Elizabeth Motts is a Program Officer at the New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH) where she oversees the Grants Program and Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare. Before joining NJCH, she worked at the Illinois Humanities Council as Public Information Assistant. Elizabethâs background includes work in the arts as a volunteer coordinating a leadership and succession conference for arts professionals, and as an intern in arts education at the Court Theatre in Chicago. She also has several years of experience as a paralegal in the area of commercial finance. She received a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts with distinction in History from the University of Michigan.

Kandyce Powell, R.N., M.S.N.Executive Director, Maine Hospice Council Workshop: Exploring Grief and Loss: A Reflective Conversation with an Interdisciplinary Panel of Hospice and Palliative Care Providers

Kandyce Powell has been involved with end-of-life care for most of her professional career. Since 1992, she has been the Executive Director of the Maine Hospice Council where she provides educational, technical and advocacy assistance for agencies, organizations, institutions and individuals interested in improving the quality of life for the dying and bereaved. She has been instrumental in developing partnerships to address these issues and is a tireless advocate for the underserved. Nationally, Kandyce is a member of the NHPCO Council of States Steering Committee as well as its Access and Diversity Task Force. She also serves on the Alliance of State Pain Initiatives Advisory Board and Chairs the National Veteran’s Advisory Council. Kandyce is a frequent speaker on topics related to end-of-life care both in Maine and nationally.

Lois LaCivita Nixon, Ph.D, M.P.H. Professor, Ethics and Humanities, College of Medicine and College of Public Health, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida Workshop: The Intimacy of the Body: Exploring the Unique Relationship Between Caregivers and Their Patients

Lois LaCivita Nixon has graduate degrees from Rollins College (M.A.T.), Middlebury College (M.Litt.), and the University of South Florida (Ph.D., M.P.H.). Her area of study includes medical ethics and humanities, women’s issues, aging, and the impact of globalism on health care. In addition to co-editing two books on health care (On Doctoring and Trials, Tribulations, and Celebrations) and co-authoring one (Literary Anatomies), Dr. Nixon has published in The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Law, Medicine & Health Care, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Pharos, The Journal of Aging and Identity, and Academic Medicine. Recent articles include “Pyramids and Rhomboids in the Rationalist World of Medicine” and “Emerging Issues in International Health Systems Organization.” For two years, she served as Chair of the Hillsborough County Hospital Authority and has been a member of the Committee on Governance and Circle of Life Committee for the American Hospital Association, and has been active in the National Association of Public Hospitals. She is a former Peace Corps Volunteer (Togo), a three-time NEH Fellow, a PEW Trust Fellow, and a Fulbright scholar (Jordan). She has been an editor of NYU’s Literature, Arts, and Medicine database since 1993.

Todd L. Savitt, Ph.D. Department of Medical Humanities, East Carolina University School of Medicine; editor, Medical Readers’ Theater: A Guide and Scripts. Workshop: Medical Readers’ Theater

Todd L. Savitt is a historian of medicine. He received his bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, attended the University of Rochester School of Medicine and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. After teaching the history of medicine and medical humanities at the University of Florida College of Medicine he joined the faculty of the Department of Medical Humanities at East Carolina University School of Medicine, where he presently teaches history and medical ethics. In 1988, Savitt organized ECU’s medical readers’ theater program, taking medical student readers into local communities to perform stories about medicine and hold discussions about the stories with the audience. His publications include Medical Readers’ Theater: A Guide and Scripts.

Judy Schaefer, R.N.C., M.A. Author, editor, lecturer, teacher, and advocate for patients as well as for nurses. Workshop: The Courage to Create: Finding Your Voice Through Writing

Judy Schaefer is editor of the first bio/autobiographical work about nurse-poets, The Poetry of Nursing (Kent State U P, 2006) and a pioneering co-editor with Cortney Davis, of the first international anthology of creative writing by nurses, Between the Heartbeats (U of Iowa P, 1995), followed by Intensive Care (U of Iowa P, 2003) the second anthology by Davis and Schaefer. She is author of a collection of poetry, Harvesting the Dew (Vista, 1997). Schaefer has lectured for The Pennsylvania State University and is a member of The Kienle Center, Penn State University, College of Medicine, Hershey, PA. Born on a farm in Missouri, Schaefer is the proud mother of Jill, and Oma to Conor and Noah; she lives with her husband, Dan, in Pennsylvania.

Lizz Sinclair Program Officer for the Maine Humanities Council Workshop: How to Start a Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® Program at your Institution

Lizz Sinclair has been a Program Officer for the Maine Humanities Council for the past ten years, directing the Let’s Talk About It program for libraries and organizing Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®, an award-winning reading and discussion group for health care professionals. As the Program Officer for Literature & Medicine in Maine and nationally, she has been involved in every phase of the program: working with scholars and healthcare professionals in organizing programs; organizing state and national conferences and bi-annual national training institutes, as well as local and national presentations about the program; working with the program evaluator on design and implementation of program evaluation; and editing and writing for Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine.

Lizz is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a degree in history and theatre design; she also graduated cum laude from the Maine College of Art. She studied community building with the Urban Theological Unit in Sheffield, England and artist-designed-and-run community art programs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Yorkshire, England; and Portland, Maine.

Hugh Silk, M.D., FAAFP Family physician at Hahnemann Family Health Center in Worcester, MA Workshop: Balance & Boundaries: Personal Reflections on the Professional Life

Hugh Silk, MD, FAAFP, is a family physician at Hahnemann Family Health Center in Worcester, MA as part of the faculty of University of Massachusetts Medical School and Family Medicine Residency. He graduated from McMaster Medical School in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and did his residency at University of Massachusetts Family Medicine Residency in Worcester. He has used film to teach medical students about family and illness and short stories to teach residents about balance and a life in medicine. He has also taught undergraduates about literature and social reflection at Harvard University with Robert Coles.

Marguerite Stapleton Vice-President for Mission Effectiveness at Sisters of Charity Health System in Lewiston, Maine Workshop: Spiritual Grounding for Health Care Professionals

Marguerite Stapleton has served as the Vice-President for Mission Effectiveness at Sisters of Charity Health System in Lewiston since 1993. Besides being responsible for educating and motivating employees, trustees and physicians to live the Mission and Values of the organization, she also oversees the work of the Institutional Ethics Committee, and the organization's outreach to Haiti. She leads Spiritual Grounding sessions for leaders and provides Work Sabbaths for employees.

Currently Marguerite serves on the Professional Advisory Committee for the Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice and on the Advisory Council for Wisdom’s Center. She is a past member of the Maine Council of Churches Board of Directors and past chair of the United Way of Androscoggin County.

Marguerite did her undergraduate study at Immaculata College. She has a M.S from the University of Illinois and has done graduate study at Boston College and Villanova University.

She has given workshops, conferences, and retreats throughout the US and Canada.

Marguerite loves to read, is an avid gardener and belongs to the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association.

Kathleen Sullivan, M.S.W., M.F.A. Psychotherapist and poet Workshop: The Caretakers’ Dilemma: Breaking the Silence

Having worked as a psychotherapist for almost forty years, Kathleen Sullivan began writing poems ten years ago in an effort to address her own experience of inner silence. While earning an MFA in poetry, she became determined to find a way to speak about her day to day work with her patients—about the interrelationship between her patients’ story and her own story.

While doing the research for this work, Kathleen began studying a new field of psychoanalysis called Relational Psychoanalysis which is exploring the importance of the therapist’s conscious and unconscious processes for the outcome of the therapy. Relational Psychoanalysis is expanding the boundaries of self-revelation on the part of the therapist and dovetails nicely with Kathleen’s work.

Kathleen wrote her MFA thesis on the conflict between ethics and loss of personal voice and ultimately found a way to speak about both the client’s story and her own which, she believes, not only does no harm to the patient but also fulfills the highest ethical consideration of ‘doing good.’