For many, the medical humanities’ origin story is set on a hill in northeast Ohio. As early as 1985, Hiram College’s Dr. Carol Cram Donley, a professor of English, spearheaded a collaboration between the small, rural liberal arts college and Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine (now Northeast Ohio Medical University), working in collaboration with Dr. Martin Kohn to host visiting speakers and workshop leaders interested in the intersections of literature and medicine. In 1988-1989, Drs. Donley and Kohn received an NEH grant to orchestrate their first summer Institute for Humanities and Medicine, and were subsequently awarded an NEH Challenge Grant to found Hiram College’s Center for Literature and Medicine—which, via its regular programming and biennial summer seminars, created an intellectual sanctuary for interdisciplinary collaboration, creative experimentation, and radical re-imagining of the role and scope of the humanities in medical practice and education. A 2017 recipient of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities’ Cornerstone Award, which “recognizes outstanding, enduring contribution(s) by an institution that has deeply enriched and/or helped shape the direction of the fields of bioethics and/or the health humanities,” the Center for Literature and Medicine has been a formative influence on generations of scholars, artists, and health care providers, as illustrated by testimonies in the booklet prepared on this occasion by former Center Director Dr. Erin Gentry Lamb.
In April 2023, at the age of 85, Carol Donley died of complications from COVID-19, weeks after having been named a recipient of the Health Humanities Consortium’s Lifetime Achievement & Service Award. It is my distinct honor to serve as current Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine, and to hold the title of Carol C. Donley Chair in Biomedical Humanities—an academic program Dr. Donley helped establish, making Hiram College the first institution in the United States to offer an undergraduate major in medical humanities (a field of study that continues to grow and flourish in colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada, as demonstrated by the ongoing report on health humanities baccalaureate programs co-authored by Erin Gentry Lamb, Sarah Berry, and Therese Jones). In this capacity, it was my pleasure to organize and host last weekend’s symposium “Literature, Medicine, and Memory: A Symposium in Memory of Dr. Carol Donley,” which brought together diverse, eclectic, and electric voices from across the broad and lively realm we call the health humanities, for a two-day event on the campus of Hiram College intended both to pay tribute to Dr. Donley’s legacy and to continue in her spirit—that is, as anyone who knew her will tell you, a spirit of warm and generous collegiality. Here, with gratitude to all of its participants, I offer some brief summary and reflection on the symposium proceedings—both for the many people who were unable to come, but who were integral to the Center’s formative years, and whose lives and work have been directly shaped by Dr. Donley’s work, and for the many others who have perhaps never heard of Dr. Donley or the Center (as I had not, before I saw a fortuitous job ad in 2016) but whose work aligns with and extends her vision.
In the opening session, Dr. Donley’s longtime collaborator Martin Kohn, Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, and former Center director Erin Gentry Lamb, Carl F. Asseff, MD, MBA, JD Designated Professor in Medical Humanities at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, shared reflections on the formation of the Center and on the future directions of health humanities as a field. Both spoke effusively of the centrality of Carol Donley’s ethos to the Center’s endeavors—her absence of pretension, her warmth and generosity. Jay Baruch, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, and longtime friend of the Center for Literature and Medicine, spoke similarly of Dr. Donley, acknowledging her role in shepherding his first book project to publication. Dr. Baruch’s presentation, “The Power of Singular Moments in Evidence-Based Medicine,” considered the impact of moments in clinical practice—the brief instants and instances shared and experienced by patients, families, and health care workers, re-inhabited and explored in writing.
The notion of the moment—in particular, “Defining Moments”—also featured prominently in the presentation by Kesha Morant Williams, Professor of Humanities and Communication Arts and Senior Advisor for College Diversity, Equity and Belonging at Elizabethtown College, who challenged us to consider our “center”: that is, the ideologies that inform our relationship to the social world and to one another. Articulating a phrase that continued to surface in conversation throughout the seminar, Dr. Morant Williams urged us to be conscious of when and where we are “entering another person’s story”—to consider how the narrative and context leading up to the encounter (in particular, clinical encounter) might inform our communication. Poet and scholar—and fellow Synapsis writer—Travis Chi Wing Lau, Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, further probed the meanings and possibilities of communication in his presentation “Crip Memorials: Disability Poetics & Embodyminded Elegies,” as he considered the elegiac nature of disability poetics. Grappling with Elaine Scarry’s influential and oft-cited theorization of pain as a destroyer of language, Dr. Chi Wing Lau’s presentation offered a provocation: is pain actually actively antithetical to language, or are we just poor interpreters of pain?
A roundtable discussion on “Narrative Bioethics”—the subject of the Center’s early seminars, and the title of an interdisciplinary Hiram class team-taught by Biomedical Humanities and Nursing faculty—took up questions of interpretation again, featuring two scholars who have had distinguished careers in the medical humanities, along with two scholars in earlier years of their careers, in conversation on the applications of literature and ideas of narrative competencies in medical education. Susan Stagno, Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Bioethics & Health Humanities and founder of the Humanities Pathway at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and Anne Hudson Jones, former Hobby Family Professor in Medical Humanities at the Institute for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at The University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston, founding editor of Literature and Medicine, and recent recipient of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities’ Lifetime Achievement Award, discussed meanings of and approaches to narrative-based ethics along with Rachel Conrad Bracken, Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University, and Lindsey Grubbs, Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. Addressing ideas of interpretive hegemony, the panel anticipated and served as an apt introduction to a presentation by Catherine Belling, Associate Professor of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, titled “Learning to Read: Text, Context, and Ethics.” Beginning with a discussion of having been trained to consider “lexicon not context–words not worlds” in the analysis of literature, Dr. Belling challenged ideas of “right” and erroneous reading, considering how formulations of “context” have informed both literary studies and clinical care.
Symposium participants not only considered theoretical approaches to poetry, but produced poems of their own, in a sonic-pleasure-suffused workshop facilitated by Dave Lucas, former Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio, who currently teaches in the Writing program at Case Western Reserve University and in the Medical Humanities program at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. The first day concluded with a staged reading of poems from Jeanne Bryner’s poetry collection Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Celebrated, Honored, and Remembered, followed by conversation with Bryner. Drawn from research into historical figures, interviews, and the author’s own experience as a nurse, Tenderly Lift Me considers the profession’s complexities of caretaking: “Our history isn’t an album of healers / dressed in snowy uniforms, white oxfords, / and halo caps,” as Bryner writes in “Standing There,” one of the poems featured in the performance; “Our story is we did not break and run— / no matter how close the lightning gouged.”
The following afternoon, attendees traded their pencils for magic markers to try their hand at comics in a graphic medicine session led by Shirlene Obuobi, writer, artist, and cardiology fellow at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Dr. Obuobi—widely known via her viral Instagram account, @shirlywhirlMD—discussed her use of the graphic form to educate and empower in her presentation titled “Comics as a Tool for Self Reflection and Advocacy.” Following Dr. Obuobi’s presentation, Brandy Schillace, author, historian, and Editor in Chief of BMJ’s Medical Humanities, similarly addressed the reach and impact of medical humanities work in a discussion of access and diversity in the realm of publishing. Speaking from extensive editorial experience, Dr. Schillace’s presentation “Medical Humanities for Social Justice: Making Changes for a Better World” addressed practical efforts in expanding the voices and perspectives represented in medical humanities scholarship.
The keynote address was delivered by writer, neurologist and palliative care physician Anna DeForest, author of the stunning debut novel A History of Present Illness and Assistant Attending in Supportive Care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I am deliberate about order here, as Dr. DeForest is, she affirms, “a writer and a physician, in that order,” having turned to pursue medical school after earning an MFA and teaching composition and creative writing for some years. Titled “Ways of Seeing Suffering,” Dr. DeForest’s keynote emphasized attending to language, noting the ways care with words serves palliative care in particular, where “communication is our primary intervention.” In this way, the intersection between literature and medicine is strikingly clear. “It is true to say that I would not have become a doctor if schools and centers and organizations like this one hadn’t started a movement to say that people like me might make good doctors,” Dr. DeForest began her address; “In this way I am rather directly the beneficiary of the work of Dr. Donley and other early advocates for the medical humanities.”
This is, of course, a woefully incomplete and inadequate account of an event that strove to not only memorialize the kind of magic Carol Donley created, but to conjure it. Here, so much depends, as Dr. Baruch noted, on moments: on the happenings of in-between spaces: in meals shared on the sunny campus green, in conversations over coffee and on walks, in the closing open mic where participants—published poets, performers, medical students—shared their work with one another. For forty-eight hours, we had the privilege of entering one another’s stories.
In the acknowledgements for their 2002 edited collection Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories, Carol Donley and Martin Kohn wrote, on the occasion of the Center’s tenth anniversary of, “a bemused wonder over how fruitful our collaboration is and how fortunate we are in our opportunities and friendships” (ix). I stand at the helm of the Center for Literature and Medicine, now in its fourth decade, in deep humility and gratitude, with similar “bemused wonder” at the vitality, influence, and plentitude of our field.
Works Cited:
Donley, Carol C., and Martin Kohn, eds. Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories: a Collection of Original Works in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Center for Literature, Medicine and the Health Care Professions, Kent State UP, 2002.
Cover image courtesy of the Center for Literature and Medicine