Storytelling and Imaging in Medical Diagnosis

Rita Charon, MD, PhD
Director, Program in Narrative Medicine
College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University

Murray Grossman, MD, EdD
Associate Professor of Neurology
School of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania

Tuesday • April 11, 2006 • 5:00 pm

200 College Hall, 3450 Woodland Walk
(off 34th b. Walnut & Spruce)
Note date change, previously advertised as 4/12

Free. Public invited.

We communicate by telling stories. Not only is telling stories important for cultures, but so is listening to them.

In medicine, through an innovative program created and run by Dr. Rita Charon at Columbia University, students and doctors are learning how narrative and listening to the stories their patients tell them can help make them better practitioners.

Here at Penn's Medical School, Dr. Murray Grossman and his team are unlocking important differences in how the brain behaves as it processes stories and other language skills in healthy adults and patients with diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Please join these two distinguished physician researchers as they discuss the role of narrative and imaging in health, illness, and healing.

Suggested Reading

Rita Charon. Narrative and Medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, February 26, 2004, 350:862-864.

The Art of Healing: Listening to Patients' Stories Develops Empathy, by Barbara Pollack. Columbia Magazine, Fall 2003.

The Grossman Lab at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center.