An interview with Philip Cawkwell, MS4, NYU School of Medicine, Rudin Fellow 2014-15 By: Katie Grogan, DMH, Associate Director, Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine Assistance from Tamara Prevatt, Intern, Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine The Rudin Fellowship in Medical Ethics and Humanities supports medical trainees at NYU School of Medicine – including medical students, residents, and clinical fellows – pursuing year-long research projects in medical humanities and medical ethics under the mentorship of senior faculty. It was established [read more]
Category: Medical Ethics
Two Doctors, Two Generations: Q&A with Dr. Barron Lerner
On May 6, 2014, Barron Lerner, MD, PhD, kicked off the Lerner Lectureship series with a talk that explored the evolution of medical ethics through the lens of his father’s and his own practice of medicine. Dr. Lerner’s father, Phillip I. Lerner, MD, was “a revered clinician, teacher and researcher who always put his patients first, but also a physician willing to ‘play God,’ opposing the very revolution in patients’ rights that his son was studying and teaching to his [read more]
The Social Construction of Cancer - Part 3
Editor’s Note: This is the third of four installments from guest blogger Dwai Banerjee, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s department of social anthropology. Images illustrated by Amy Potter, courtesy of Cansupport. Part III In a later visit with the homecare teams, I met Rajesh – a 29-year-old man who has been battling cancer since his teenage years. The walls of his room in a dense middle-class neighborhood were bare but for two pictures – one of a Hindu deity and [read more]
The Social Construction of Cancer - Part 2
Editor’s Note: This is the second of four installments from guest blogger Dwai Banerjee, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s department of social anthropology. Images illustrated by Amy Potter, courtesy of Cansupport. Part II However, at this point, Shambu and Rohini’s story took a sharp turn. The palliative care team I was visiting with discovered that, partly because of not collectively acknowledging the extent of the disease, Shambu and Rohini had started visiting a new neighborhood private ‘ayurvedic hospital.’ This hospital [read more]
The Social Constructions of Cancer
Editor’s Note: This is the first of four installments from guest blogger Dwai Banerjee, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s department of social anthropology. Images illustrated by Amy Potter, courtesy of Cansupport. Introduction The contemporary landscape of healthcare in Delhi inspires very little confidence. The lack of public insurance, scarcity of resources and rising cost of care in the vast network of private hospitals has ensured that for much of the city’s poor, the diagnosis of cancer comes without any hope [read more]
Walk a Mile in My Moccasins
Commentary by Amy Ellwood, MSW, LCSW; Professor of Family Medicine & Psychiatry, University of Nevada School of Medicine, Las Vegas, Nevada Communicating Through Story Storytelling has been around since the dawn of time. Before the invention of paper, the Gutenberg press, telephone, television, internet, Kindle, texting, tweeting, Skyping, and emailing, people communicated by actually talking to each other face to face. Before language evolved, animal species communicated through grunts, howls, screeches, and gestures. Body language and micro expressions say more [read more]
Breast Milk As Medicine And Virus: Modern Maternity And HIV/AIDS
Mothers need to be understood as neither the repositories of pure nutrition nor the potentially infectious contaminators of the young, but as materially embedded subjects whose bodies are of this world as everyone’s are.
Rescuing Sympathy
Commentary by Jack Coulehan, M.D. M.P.H., Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine and Fellow, Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, New York Many authors who write about empathy in medicine are careful to draw a bright line between sympathy and empathy. For example, Hojat in his excellent survey of research on Empathy in Patient Care, considers the two concepts as almost dichotomous, albeit with a small area of overlap. (1) In this categorization, empathy is a cognitive attribute [read more]
Disease Causality
Commentary by Daniel Goldberg, J.D., Ph.D. Health Policy & Ethics Fellow, Chronic Disease Prevention & Control Research Center, Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine; Research Faculty, Initiative on Neuroscience & Law, Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine There is a legal doctrine known as “attractive nuisance.” The basic idea of the concept, grounded in the law of torts, is that an owner or occupier of a premises can be held liable for negligence if they are responsible for [read more]
Dr. Fleischmann Draws Dr. Munk In Terezin
Commentary by Michael Nevins, M.D., author of Jewish Medicine: What it is and Why it Matters and A Tale of Two “Villages”: Vineland and Skillman, NJ. This commentary written in conjunction with an exhibit at New York University School of Medicine, Sept. 24-Oct.19: Art and Medicine in Terezin. All of us felt a sense of sliding helplessness, again and again, day after day, night after night, you descended toward the abyss whose bottom was unfathomable….you felt only the downward movement, [read more]
