John Moses is a primary care pediatrician and a documentary photographer based at Duke University. He has been using documentary photography to explore the intersection of social and medical issues for the last fifteen years. In this talk, Dr. Moses shared his photographs of adolescent parents in North Carolina (published in the book The Youngest Parents); portraits of pioneering primary care physicians (published in Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care); and a current series of...

In the United States, more than half a million babies are born prematurely each year (12.8% of all births). This is an increase of more than 36% since the 1980s. More than 70% are born between 34 and 36 weeks. 22% are born between 28 and 33 weeks; 6% are born before 28 weeks. Duke University Former Pediatric Chief Resident Dr. Alison Sweeney knew that one of the most daunting rotations for pediatric residents and medical students was the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Few came to the...

This year, about 2.5 million Americans will die. About 900,000 of them, or three in ten, will get hospice care in their last weeks or months. Hospice is specialized care for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live. It offers a way in which family, doctors, nurses, pastors, and the community can all be involved in helping a person during their last days of life. The majority of existing documentary work related to hospice focuses on the perspectives of patients and their...

This year, about 2.5 million Americans will die. About 900,000 of them, or three in ten, will get hospice care in their last weeks or months. Hospice is specialized care for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live. Its workers and volunteers often develop close personal relationships with their patients, exploring emotional, psychological and spiritual questions as well as medical ones. In this story, John Biewen followed one hospice patient through the last two months of...

In this talk, writer Sam Stephenson examines Smith’s career-long concern with caregiving, including his famous photographic essays such as “Nurse Midwife,” “Country Doctor,” “Albert Schweitzer: A Man of Mercy,” and “Minimata.” Sam Stephenson (born in 1966 in Chapel Hill) is a writer who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. Since 1997 he has been studying the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith and has authored three books on Smith’s work, including The Jazz Loft Project (Alfred...

“Frequent fliers” are patients with more than four visits to the emergency room in one year. While this group accounts for 4 percent of patients, they account for 25 percent of ER visits. In an effort to better understand these patients, Duke University Emergency Medicine resident Andrew Parker identified five frequent fliers and documented their stories. Here are three of those stories. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows...

For fifteen years, Radio Diaries has been giving people tape recorders and working with them to report on their own lives and histories for NPR. With this approach, Radio Diaries has helped pioneer a new form of citizen journalism and has produced some of the most acclaimed and innovative documentaries ever heard on public radio: Teenage Diaries, Prison Diaries, Diary of a Retirement Home, My So-Called Lungs, Thembi’s AIDS Diary and others. In this talk, Radio Diaries’ founder and executive...

Half of high school students currently use addictive substances. One in eight high school students have a diagnosable clinical substance use disorder involving nicotine, alcohol or other drugs. Only six to eight percent of the total number of patients in need of treatment receive care. Adolescent and Child Psychiatry Chief Resident Jennifer Segura found herself drawn to working with this population, but wanted to better understand the demands and rewards from the perspectives of clinicians...

In this talk photographer Harris will show his photographs taken at the Samaritan House Clinic in San Mateo California and discuss how his work as a documentary photographer in the field resonates with the work of physicians in the clinic. Pediatrician/photographer and former student, John Moses, introduces Harris. Alex Harris is a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) and of DoubleTake Magazine. He has taught documentary photography and writing at Duke since 1975. He helped to...

John Moses is a primary care pediatrician and a documentary photographer based at Duke University. He has been using documentary photography to explore the intersection of social and medical issues for the last fifteen years. In this talk, Dr. Moses shared his photographs of adolescent parents in North Carolina (published in the book The Youngest Parents); portraits of pioneering primary care physicians (published in Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care); and a current series of...