Synapse, Literature & Medicine Wins National Award

Literature & Medicine Wins National Awards

Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® was one of 10 programs nationwide awarded a grant from the Society for the Arts in Health Care/Johnson & Johnson Grant Program. This funding will support our second Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® Institute in June 2004. The Institute will train new seminar scholars about both the content and pedagogy of a Literature & Medicine seminar, and prepare the facilitators, hospital liaisons, and council staff members from each state for the process of organizing and implementing the seminars. Teams from five new state partners — Connecticut, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, and New Jersey — will attend the Institute. In addition, some of our existing state partners that are expanding the program to new sites will send facilitators and hospital liaisons for training.

Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® has also received a national award from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. The 2003 Helen & Martin Schwartz Prize for Excellence in Public Programming was awarded to Literature & Medicine because, according to the judges,

[I]t is a project extraordinarily strong in its humanities content and brilliantly simple in its premise: that the humanities can bridge enormous distances among people who, while working in the same physical space, may be separated by significant professional, economic and educational barriers. [We] were impressed with its outreach to an interestingly under-served audience, with its scope and replicable nature, and with its ultimate focus on the individual human being in need.

Literature & Medicine was created by the Maine Humanities Council in 1997 and is now offered nationwide in partnership with other state humanities councils.

Victoria Bonebakker, the Project Director, and Marli Weiner, the Maine Humanities Council Board Chair, accepted the award in Savannah, Georgia at the annual conference of the National Federation of State Humanities Councils in November, 2003.

print whole article

Design : Harley Design
Web : West End Webs

Literature & Medicine has received major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.