For our sixth and concluding event of the first season, we had a rich conversation with Professor Rita Charon, who is Professor and Chair of Medical Humanities & Ethics, Professor of Medicine, and Executive Director of Columbia Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. We don’t have the space to summarise all the stimulating insights Rita shared with us, but the conversation is available to listen to as an episode of our podcast.
We do want to share some of the key messages we took away about why cultivating a space in between humanities and medicine matters.
What this interdisciplinary space stands for
Rita invited us to reflect on the fundamental commitments of the space where humanities and medicine meet. She spoke of a deep commitment to life, health and care, which surely resonated with everyone who attended the event – and reminded us of why we’re all interested to work in this interdisciplinary space. It is a space where people can be open and genuine about hoping to make a contribution to how we live with illness, suffering and distress– without fear of embarrassment.
Yet, Rita also reminded us of what’s therefore at stake in this space, namely that all of this work ultimately has to improve healthcare. This means that those of us who work in this space in between humanities and medicine face a challenge to demonstrate that doing so indeed offers improvements to life, health and care. Rising to this challenge certainly resonates with the activist ethos of Narrative Medicine, and its commitment to social justice and freedom, which Rita elaborated on throughout the conversation.
Why we need to take the time
The space in between humanities and medicine can be very rewarding for those who successfully navigate it. This does mean being interested to explore how interdisciplinary exchange can lead to mutually beneficent changes in our specialist understandings and practices. It was very interesting to explore several examples of such bidirectional exchange during our conversation.
Such exchange does mean overcoming a staunch divide between what C.P. Snow called “the two cultures”, i.e. the sciences and humanities. Rita even spoke of how creating a space that bridges this divide feels a bit like digging a tunnel under walls that are designed to keep us apart. For this reason, we should also be aware of harmful stereotypes that might prevent a fruitful meeting in this interdisciplinary space. We should do away with careless assumptions about less-than-rigorous scholars in humanities or know-it-all scientists. Instead, we should create spaces to learn and understand the standards of rigour or limits to knowledge in each other’s disciplines.
Rita has identified aesthetics as space or area of interest where those with backgrounds in humanities and medicine can fruitfully meet. Aesthetics deals with our efforts to observe, interpret and evaluate what we perceive – ranging from novels and paintings to the human body. If you want to find out more about how aesthetics and medicine intersect, you can listen to the podcast for the full story. We also talk about the nature of stories, across literature, graphic novels, and the videos we shoot on our phones. It was a reminder that we value all the stories that people bring, and acknowledge their power to change us and begin journeys to change the world around us.
Throughout our conversation about how people fruitfully meet each other in the space in between medicine and humanities, one thing did become very clear. If you’re really interested in this interdisciplinary encounter, you need to invest the time. Rita provided several examples where experience shows that you can’t really rush this encounter if you want to achieve meaningful exchange. We certainly agree. It reminded us that we really started this Conversations series to try and find a shared language and establish some common ground – to check if we could begin to understand each other across entrenched cultural and disciplinary divides. We feel like we’ve certainly made some progress, but, also, that it remains a work in progress, for which we need to take the time.
Humility and vulnerability (revisited)
We want to end on a point that many of our guests have raised in the first season of Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health – and we’re grateful to Rita for highlighting its importance once more. To move in the interdisciplinary space in between medicine and humanities means coming to terms with our own ignorance. Yet, although uncertainty may stimulate tentativeness, it need not cause us anxiety or displeasure. Rather, finding out what you don’t know comes as part of the territory of intellectual curiosity – and it’s a territory that holds many rewards.
However, as Rita reminds us, moving in this interdisciplinary space is ultimately not about our own satisfaction, but about finding ways to improve life, health and care. Here, humility and vulnerability also have crucial a role to play, because these virtues are intertwined with compassionate healthcare. Of course, Rita’s pioneering work in Narrative Medicine – which equips health professionals with better skills to hear what patients are trying to tell them – has made a tremendous contribution to improving compassion in healthcare.
We are very grateful that she took the time to tell us more about it in a truly inspiring conversation.
Listen to the podcast
We recommend you have a listen to our podcast to hear the full story.
If you have any further questions or comments, do contact us at aestheticsandhealth@kent.ac.uk.
Dieter and Ian