Full Schedule

IA: Taking the History and Giving it Back (Room N)

Moderated by Catherine Belling, PhD, Medical Humanities & Bioethics, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

• Alice Domurat Dreger, PhD, MH&B, Northwestern. "Turning Over the Chart: Writing Private Histories for Survivors of Medical Trauma"
• MK Czerwiec, RN, MA candidate, MH&B, Northwestern. "When We Were 371: An Oral History of an Inpatient AIDS Unit, 1985-2000"
• Todd Hochberg, photographer, Chicago. "Moments Held: Legacy Work"

IB: Translating Representations (Room M)

Moderated by Suzanne Poirier, PhD, Medical Humanities, University of Illinois, Chicago.

• Gudrun M. Grabher, PhD, American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria. “The Ethics of the (Disfigured) Face in Medical Narratives: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face”
• Marcia Day Childress, PhD, Biomedical Ethics and Humanities, University of Virginia School of Medicine. “Beckett at the Bedside: Samuel Beckett’s Short Plays as Tutorials in Geriatrics”
• Diane Friedman MSN, NP, Northwestern University Integrated Neuroscience Graduate Program. “A Matter of Life and Death: Neurology and Film”
• Christy A. Rentmeester, PhD, Health Policy and Ethics, Creighton University School of Medicine. “Taking Healthcare Inequalities Seriously: Transgenerational Trauma in Art and Literature”

IC: Rhetoric and Practice (Room T)

Moderated by Daniel J. Brauner, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Assistant Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, University of Chicago.

• Colleen Derkatch, PhD(c), English, University of British Columbia. “Models of Medical Research and Practice, and the ‘Bench Work’ of Rhetoric in Medical Humanities”
• Jackie Rinaldi, PhD, English, Sacred Heart University: “Bringing Aristotle to the Bedside: Using Rhetorical Prompts to Elicit Patient Narratives”
• Abraham P. Schwab, PhD, Philosophy, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. “Translating Epistemic Categories into Ethical Responsibilities”

W1: Playing Doctor: Improvisational Theater, Medicine, and Clinical Skills (Room N)

Katie Watson, JD. Medical Humanities & Bioethics, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Every doctor-patient encounter is to some degree improvised. Like theatrical improvisers, physicians often don’t know who they’ll encounter or what that patient will say or do, and physicians must have the ability to listen, observe, and spontaneously respond in stressful or confusing circumstances. This workshop will begin and end with short presentations on the principles of improvisation as an art form and its applications to clinical skills, but the bulk of the session will be spent illustrating those principles by leading participants in exercises Professor Watson teaches in her medical improv class. Every registrant will participate, so please wear comfortable clothes. The emphasis of this workshop is collaboration and discovery in a non-threatening environment where there is no need to be funny or “act”!

Professor Watson has studied and performed improvisational theater for years, she has taught it to medical students for six years, and she is an adjunct faculty member at the Training Center of Chicago’s Second City Theatre where she teaches improv to actors, nannies, and cab drivers.

W2: The Art of Observation – The Observation of Art and The Discerning Eye (meet in Room T, walk together to Museum of Contemporary Art*)

Visual Art, Medicine, and Clinical Skills

Alvin Telser, PhD Cell & Molecular Biology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; seminar instructor, Medical Humanities Seminar on the Art of Observation

Kate Moioli, MA, Woman's Board Fellow, The Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum Educator, Museum of Contemporary Art

Much of life (and a good deal of medicine) centers on the ability to examine a person, an object, or a situation visually and then describe it accurately both orally and in writing. Through a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), this workshop, based on seminars for 1st- and 2nd-year medical students at Northwestern, offers an opportunity to enhance your visual sense and analytical and communication skills as they relate to medical practice. We will use the process of observing and discussing works of art to explore a variety of artistic, historical, and medically-related concerns such as body language and interpersonal relationships, cultural sensitivity, and managing change in living systems, among others. No previous art history knowledge is necessary and, in fact, it should be left at the door!

*This workshop will take place at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, across the street from the conference site. MCA admission for workshop participants will be $8 ($5 for students), payable on site.

W3: Film, Medicine, and Clinical Skills (Room M)

Hands on Film Techniques for Medical Education

Maren Grainger-Monsen, MD, Filmmaker in Residence and Director of the Program in Bioethics and Film at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics

Filming your own interviews of patients, care providers and others associated with health care can be a powerful tool used in medical education. However, often the artistic and technical flaws in these “home-made” videos actually impede them from being as effective as they could be. This workshop is an opportunity to learn the components and skills of a well-crafted video interview and actually have the opportunity to practice them in a hands-on fashion. Workshop participants will be divided into groups to create their own video interviews and then come back together as a group to view and discuss their process. We will also discuss different ways these tools can be integrated into classroom settings.

The second part of this interactive workshop will be focused on methods for using professionally made documentary films in the classroom for discussion and reflective practice. Scenes from Worlds Apart and Citizen Scientists will be screened and excerpts from their facilitator guides will be discussed. The workshop leader is a professional filmmaker and will be drawing from her own experience as well as screening excerpts from her own films.

Maren Grainger-Monsen, MD, Filmmaker in Residence and Director of the Program in Bioethics and Film at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, studied film at the London International Film School, received her medical doctorate from the University of Washington and emergency medicine and palliative care training at Stanford University School of Medicine. She has been producing award-winning documentary films for medical education and national public television broadcast for the past 15 years, including Hold Your Breath, and Worlds Apart on US health care disparities, The Vanishing Line, and Grave Words on end-of-life issues and Where the Highway Ends on rural health care. She is currently finishing Citizen Scientists, on patient advocacy groups and the patient’s experience of clinical trials and is working on a new project on global health called The Revolutionary Optimists.

IIA: Teaching and the Clinic (Room Q)

Moderated by Douglas Reifler, MD, Medicine and MH&B, Northwestern.

• Deborah Bowman, PhD, Medical Ethics and Law, University of London. “Telling Tales: The Ethics Roadshow and its Place in Preventing ‘Ethical Erosion’”
• Leah Rosenberg, MS4, and Alan Carver, MD, Neurology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “The Grandest Profession: Integrating George Eliot’s Middlemarch into a Clinical Elective Experience for Medical Students”
• Carol Schilling, PhD, Medical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania. “’As a physician, I will need to…’: Reading the Patient, Writing the Future Doctor”

IIB: Narratives, Fictions, and Ethics (Canning Auditorium)

Moderated by Kayhan Parsi, PhD, JD, Bioethics and Health Policy, Loyola University Chicago.

• Barry De Coster, PhD. Philosophy, Worcester State College. “Practice and Pregnancy: Rethinking the ‘Birth Plan’ as a Moral Story”
• Chantal Marazia, PhD, Research Institut in Clinical Ethics and Medical Humanities, Lugano, Switzerland. “From the Bedside to the Bed: Doctors’ Unfortunate Love Affairs in Modern Literature”
• Linda Raphael, PhD, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical Humanities, The George Washington University School of Medicine. “When Empathy and Sympathy Fail: Narrative Disclosures in a Doctor’s Story”