Keynote: The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Identity and Empathy Presenter: Rafael Campo, national award winning poet; faculty member and practitioner of general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Through a reading of poetry and prose, Dr. Campo will share his personal journey of renewal in the face of the dehumanizing biomedical training process. He will illustrate how an engagement with literary writing helps care providers to ask important questions about themselves in relation to their patients, abetting empathy while preserving professionalism. He will also explore the possibilities of healing available to both care providers and the afflicted in the narrative act.

Keynote: Listening for the Self-Telling Body: How Clinicians Can Absorb What Their Patients Emit Presenter: Rita Charon, Professor of Clinical Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University; Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine

Dr. Charon will explore how bodies tell of things—even when the person who inhabits that body might not know what the body tells. Doctors, nurses, social workers, and therapists absorb what patients tell them in words, silences, gestures, position, and material aspects of the body. In the oddest way, we are like great big radar screens taking in all bits of light and matter from an alien planet as we try to comprehend what kind of living is going on in there (and of course we understand that, to the patient, we must be like an alien planet too.) This talk will give us a chance to think together about means of improving our abilities to register and value and comprehend all that beams our way in the clinical encounter.

Keynote: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures Presenter: Anne Fadiman, Award winning author, essayist, editor, and teacher; author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman will explore the cross-cultural experience of reporting and writing The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Her book, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, traced the dramatic conflicts that arose between a refugee family from Laos and their American doctors over the care of their seriously ill child. Fadiman’s talk will trace the cross-cultural challenges she herself faced during her eight years of immersion in Hmong culture.

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

There is a large and growing body of material about the introduction of works of art into medicine and healing. Among other things, art can be a strategy for opening up communication between healers and patients, a means of reinterpreting events and circumstances, and an opportunity for renewal and sustenance. This workshop will address ways healers and patients have turned to works of art to make meaning and to reflect on their experiences using a variety of genres: film, photography, painting, artist books, music, poetry, short stories, and plays. Works by Jeanne Bryner, Ethan Canin, Martha Hall, Gretchen Berland, and Tomio Tada are among those that will be considered.

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

There are special issues that need to be considered when facilitating humanities-based groups for health care professionals. This workshop will give participants a basic understanding of some of these issues, focusing especially on group dynamics.

Balance & Boundaries: Personal Reflections on the Professional Life | Sessions II & III Presenters: David Loxterkamp, M.D. is a family physician in Belfast, Maine and the author of A Measure of My Days and articles for The British Medical Journal, The Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine & Hugh Silk, M.D. FAAFP, is a family physician at Hahnemann Family Health Center in Worcester, MA

Health providers employ all the usual strategies for coping with workplace stress: work harder, consume more, distance ourselves and accept frustration and mediocrity as the sad reality of our vocation. Yet that which might renew us lies immediately at hand; in fact, it is our stock in trade. Relationships—with patients, colleagues, friends, and family—are a laboratory, a park bench, a banquet feast, a mirror to our personal lives if we let them become so, and if we recognize the corners and can negotiate them. This workshop invites participants to discuss relationships and how we engage them through innovation, group gatherings, story-telling and writing. And with the understanding that all relationships are a work in progress, the “practice” of medicine.

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

This workshop addresses the dilemma of a clinician’s wanting to communicate about those moments in the healing relationship when—to quote William Carlos Williams, “just there, the thing, in all its greatest beauty, may for a moment be freed to fly...The thing, the thing, of which I am in chase,”—and at the same time respect the patient’s ownership of the story and right to privacy and confidentiality, We will explore the idea of using a poem written by the clinician and given to the patient as a means of deepening the empathetic connection and advancing, through the language of poetry, both the patient and therapist’s understanding of themselves. Additionally, these poems have the capacity to challenge the sometimes shame-inducing barrier of secrecy about what happens behind the closed doors of the therapist's office and offer the patient the opportunity to feel that telling her story might be of help to someone else.

Hopefully, the workshop will inspire other caregivers to see a poem written by them and given to their patients as a helpful gift both to their patients and to themselves.

A Clinician’s Guide to the Soul | Sessions III & IV Presenter: Veneta Masson, R.N., M.A. Washington, D.C., author of the poetry collection Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill; her new collection of poems is titled Clinician’s Guide to the Soul

As a family nurse practitioner, I relied on countless “clinician’s guides,” concise, up-to-the-minute print or online references to specific topics like antibiotics, common skin conditions or pediatric lab values. But, a guide to the soul! What is the soul? And why, in this golden age of scientific exploration and achievement, do so many of us insist on its relevance to health and health care?

In his book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes, “Soul is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.” I would add that it is of vital importance to healers.

In this workshop, I’ll share some poems, my own and others, that have nourished me, enlarged my understanding of healing art, and guided my practice. As time allows, we’ll also exercise our creative imagination through some simple play with words and images that I think of as “balancing acts.” This kind of play is an excellent way to care for the soul and enrich our personal and professional lives.

The Courage to Write: Finding Your Voice Through Creative Writing | Session III Presenter: Judy Schaefer, R.N.C., M.A., is a part-time lecturer for Penn State. A poet, she co-edited Between the Heartbeats (1995) and Intensive Care (2003), anthologies of creative writing by nurses, and edited The Poetry of Nursing: Poems and Commentaries of Leading Nurse-Poets (2006)

Through hands-on writing and reading, this workshop will address the creative writing process for health care professionals. The barriers, frustrations, and joys of work in health care will be processed through the prism of literary devices toward a more healing, confident, and enlightened outcome for both patient and caregiver.

Exploring Grief and Loss: A Reflective Conversation with an Interdisciplinary Panel of Hospice and Palliative Care Providers | Session I Presenters: Elizabeth Hart, M.D., Family physician/hospice and palliative physician at Maine General Health in Augusta, Maine; Greg Burns, R.N., Nursing Coordinator, The JASON Program (Maine); and Kandyce Powell, R.N., M.S.N., Executive Director, Maine Hospice Council

Drawing on a few brief readings, this discussion will offer us an opportunity to consider the stories of grief and loss that healthcare professionals may carry in caring for people in times of intense suffering and at the end of life. The panel will offer insights into how healthcare professionals may grieve in ways that may impair their work or in ways that might be sustaining and therapeutic.

“Fact” vs. “Truth” in Narratives of Illness | Session II Presenter: Rafael Campo, M.D., M.F.A., national award winning poet; faculty member and practitioner of general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

The experience of illness provides an especially notable occasion to examine a central narrative concern: the differences between “fact” and “truth.” In this workshop, we will define a “biocultural” narrative of the illness experience, in contrast to the restrictive biomedical narrative encountered in today’s health care setting. We will then consider how a better appreciation of “fact” versus “truth” may be practically useful and potentially renewing to care providers, as exemplified in poems and excerpts of creative nonfiction that join us empathetically through their sound and structure as much as through their insistent invitation to share in diverse human experiences. We will also explore the larger issue of the complex link between creative self-expression and healing. The discussion will address literary works by Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Veneta Masson, Abraham Verghese, and others.

Getting Intimate: Using Humanities in Medicine to Approach the Human Body | Session III Presenter: 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

This workshop considers challenges associated with body intimacies in professional relationships between health care professionals and patients—and ways that images and literature can help explore and illuminate sensitive issues. Participants will examine specific examples from the humanities in order to illustrate how they might be used in medical school courses and in programs for other health care professionals.

The subject of the stories embodied in the selected materials are essential components of the medical text; however, as Emily Dickinson might observe, and as participants of this workshop will explore, the humanities perspective provides a slightly different slant. We will discuss how and why the non-traditional Medical Humanities selections can generate uneasiness and discomfort among medical students and other health professionals. More importantly, we will consider the importance of such inclusions and the contributions they make to understanding and improving care.

Discussion relates to artworks by Alice Neel, Suzanne Valadon, Susan Mates, Matuschka, and Frida Kahlo; writings/poetry by Lucille Clifton, Linda Pastan, Sharon Olds, Ronna Wineberg, and Randall Jarrell; and, possibly, a filmclip. For this presentation all selected materials are related to women’s bodies on a shared journey from birth to death.

How to Show Results: Evaluative Design for Literature and Medicine Programs |
Session I Presenter: 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

Humanities-based programs for health care professionals can have many positive benefits to those who participate and, in turn, for their patients, colleagues and institutions. Although these programs are generally not costly to implement, it can be difficult to make the case for incorporating them into the budgets-and ethos-of health care institutions. We will explore how the evaluator and staff involved in the national program, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care used the Kellogg Foundation’s logic model to design an on-line evaluation for participants that measures the effect of the program in 5 key areas: empathy, job satisfaction, cultural awareness, inter-personal skills, and communication. The results have been impressive, and are beginning to make a stronger case for the value of the program.