Events & Initiatives

The Social Side of Health: How Reducing Inequality Can Improve Health Outcomes in America

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Featuring guest speaker Peter Sterling, MD, a former Freedom Rider and Professor of Neuroscience at Penn.

Narrative’s Challenge to Medicine: To See, to Hear and to Transform

13th Annual Thorne Sparkman, Jr., MD Lectureship

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Featuring guest speaker Rita Charon, MD, PhD, who is the Professor and Chair of Medical Humanities & Ethics Professor of Medicine and the Executive Director of Columbia Narrative Medicine at Columbia University

The Ethics of Publishing Creative Nonfiction about Patients

Friday, November 10, 2023

As a physician, when should you take a piece of writing about a patient and publicize it? And why?
This virtual lecture and roundtable discussion will explore the ethics at play in publishing creative nonfiction about patients. To deepen our understanding, we will explore questions such as: Must one always have explicit consent from a patient before publishing, and is that even enough? What can we do, if anything, to remain sensitive to the inherently unbalanced power dynamic between a physician with expertise and a patient facing the vulnerability of illness? To what extent do such ethics align with contemporary standards for morality (e.g., magazine and journal guidelines around submissions, HIPAA, informed consent)?