For our December Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Maura Spiegel, who teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College. She is co-director of the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Humanities and Ethics at Vagelos Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where she also teaches a film course to first-year medical students. She has lectured on Narrative Medicine in Venice, London, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Baroda, India, and in cities around...

For our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Deborah Levy, the acclaimed author of six novels including Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both nominated for the Booker Prize, and most recently The Man Who Saw Everything, to be published in the USA in October 2019. Levy will be speaking about “Hypochondria and History: Searching for Story.” About her novel Hot Milk, Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, said: “A hot...

For our October Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Professor Griffin received her B.A. from Harvard, where she majored in American History and Literature and her PhD in American Studies from Yale. Her major fields...

For our September Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Eve Ensler, the Tony Award winning playwright, activist, and author of the Obie Award winning theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries and recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years, among numerous other honors. Ensler will speak about her new book The Apology, a powerful memoir where she revisits her childhood in an...

For our May Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D., who is the Chief of the Division of Ethics and faculty in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. Dr. Lee is a medical anthropologist with extensive experience leading empirical bioethics research that focuses on the sociocultural and ethical dimensions of emerging genomic technologies. Dr. Lee will speak about "Metaphors, Diversity and Trust in Communicating Precision Medicine."...

For our April Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change, a leading online racial justice organization. Driven by more than 1.4 million members working to build political and cultural power for Black communities, Color Of Change is creating a more human and less hostile world for all people in America. Color Of Change uses an innovative combination of technology, research, media savvy and local community engagement to build powerful movements and...

For our December Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Michael Grabell, an investigative reporter for ProPublica, covering economic issues, labor, immigration and trade. He has reported on the ground from more than 35 states, as well as some of the remotest villages in Alaska and Guatemala. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times and on NPR, Vice and CBS News. This year, his stories on retaliation against immigrant workers won the Aronson Award for social...

“Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity”: A Talk by Ronald Epstein, MD For our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Ronald Epstein, MD, a family physician, teacher, researcher and writer, who has devoted his career to understanding and improving patient-physician communication, quality of care and clinician mindfulness. He will discuss his compassionate work and recent book, entitled Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity that was published last year by Scribner. Dr....

For our October Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Nina Kraus, PhD, who is the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences, Neurobiology and Otolaryngologyat Northwestern University. Her talk will center on the ways sound processing in the brain is a reflection of brain health. "How our brains respond to sound reveals each person's unique narrative of their life experiences," says Dr. Kraus. "We have discovered a way to objectively capture the imprint that sounds leave on our brains."...

For our first Narrative Medicine Rounds for Fall 2018, we welcome Dr. Haider Warraich, whose book Modern Death deepens and enriches the conversation about death and dying that’s been growing since Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s classic How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter and Atul Guwande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. About the book, which was published last year by St. Martin’s Press, Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The...

For our May Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome writer Harriet A. Washington, who will be interviewed by Randy Cohen, creator of the radio program, Person Place Thing. Harriet A. Washington has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. As a writer and editor, she has worked for USA Today and several other publications, been a Knight Fellow...

Our April 2018 Narrative Medicine Rounds, welcomed the novelist Richard Ford, who speaks about his memoir, " Between them: Remembering my Parents," published in 2017 by The Ecco Press. Mr. Ford, the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Roman Professor of the Humanities, has been teaching at Columbia University's School of the Arts since 2012. For Mr. Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day, was the first book to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award, the questions of what...

For our March Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Sayantani DasGupta, MD MPH, who teaches in the Master’s Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Dr. DasGupta will be speaking about writing her novel, The Serpent’s Secret, which is the first book in the new Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series just published by Scholastic Press. March Narrative Medicine Rounds are...

For our first rounds in 2018, we welcome Dr. Gayatri Devi, a neurologist and graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia, who will speak about her book The Spectrum of Hope: An Optimistic and New Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias (Workman, 2017). Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And imagine how that would change the outlook of the 5 million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, not to mention their...

For our December Narrative Medicine Rounds, we celebrate the extraordinary book Narrative in Social Work Practice: The Power and Possibility of Story by Ann Burack-Weiss, Lynn Sara Lawrence, and Lynne Bamat Mijangos,eds. The book features first-person accounts by social workers who have successfully integrated narrative theory and approaches into their practice. Contributors describe innovative interventions with a wide range of individuals, families, and groups facing a variety of life...

For our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome back Elisabeth Rosenthal, who is a Harvard-trained medical doctor and veteran journalist, first with The New York Times and currently editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, the independent foundation funded reporting project focusing on health and health policy news. Dr. Rosenthal will talk about what she discovered researching and reporting the way healthcare has become a business in the last twenty-five years and many of the lessons she...

For our May Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome medical journalist, Harriet A. Washington, who will be interviewed by writer Randy Cohen, creator of the radio program, Person Place Thing, an interview show based on this idea: People are particularly engaging when they speak not directly about themselves but about something they care about. Guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them. The result? Surprising stories from great talkers. Person Place Thing...

For our October Narrative Medicine Rounds, we celebrate the work of the late poet Max Ritvo (1990-2016), whose acclaimed book of poems Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Edition, 2016) was written in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. We use the word "presence" in the title because the goal is to bring Max Ritvo into the room—not just through his poetry, but through his presence, so movingly captured in videos and audio recordings that allow him to read his own...

For our September Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Bob Mankoff, the former cartoon editor of The New Yorker and the current humor and cartoon editor of Esquire. He will speak about the intersection of the illness experience and humor and the ways each of these life-changing forces can transform the experience of health and healthcare. Bob Mankoff will be introduced by Ben Schwartz, MD, a . . Mfaculty member at Columbia University Medical Center who works with both the Departments of...

For our April Rounds, we welcome Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider and Dr. Jessica Nutik Zitter, two of the key clinicians involved in Extremis, a verité documentary exploring the harrowing decisions that doctors, families and patients face in urgent end-of- life cases. With access to the intensive care unit of a public hospital, the film offers a uniquely intimate look at the intersection of science, faith and humanity.

For the March Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Rachel Aviv, who will talk about writing and reporting on psychosis. Aviv joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2013 and often writes about psychiatry and bioethics; she has written articles on euthanasia, psychosis, addiction, and crime. She won the 2016 Scripps Howard Award for “Your Son Is Deceased,” a story on police shootings. She was named a Livingston Award finalist in 2013 and 2016. Aviv has also taught writing workshops to...

For our first Narrative Medicine Rounds in 2017, we welcome Dr. Lucy Kalanithi to the Columbia University Medical Center for a Q&A conversation with the Program in Narrative Medicine's Creative Director Nellie Hermann. Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, MD, FACP, is an internal medicine physician and faculty member at the Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA. She completed her medical degree at Yale, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society, her residency...

By Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colón, Danielle Spencer, Maura Spiegel Just published by Oxford University Press, "The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine" is the definitive work on the current state of the field of Narrative Medicine. Written by the founders of the field, the book articulates and embodies the complex foundations of this now internationally robust discipline. Through inter-related chapters on social...

“In A Different Key: The Story of Autism” is a book that was more than seven years in the making, and since its publication this year, it has advanced the discussion about autism in the public and medical worlds. In our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, Emmy Award–winning correspondent John Donvan and Peabody Award–winning television news producer Caren Zucker will talk about the book, a narrative that offers new insight into the seminal moments of the past near-century: the rise of the...