“How the Experience of the Humanities Can Help Train Doctors”
Friday, April 12th
11:00am
Memorial Union S203
For more than a dozen years, Ronald Schleifer, a professor of English, has team-taught courses with Jerry Vannatta, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine, focusing on the ways that the humanities – and particularly an understanding of narrative – can contribute to the education of physicians and other health care workers. They have conducted seminars and classes with pre-med students, students in medical school and workshops for practicing physicians and other health care professionals. Their students include the last four Rhodes Scholars from the University of Oklahoma, three of whom continued their work in the medical humanities at Oxford before returning to their medical education in the United States. Just this January they published The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices. His talk, “How the Experience of the Humanities Can Help Train Physicians” calls upon this background to argue for the systematic inclusion of humanistic understanding into the education and practice of physicians.