Let’s Play a Game: Imagination in a Narrative Medicine Workshop

Avril Tynan // In 2010, Martha C. Nussbaum published Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, a manifesto on the importance of arts and humanities education for social and political life. The role of critical thinking in global education policies is being undermined, she argues, by an emphasis on rote learning and the promotion…

Waiting for Laughter, Part 2: Finding Empathy for Pain Through Humor

James Belarde // AUTHOR’S NOTE: Both this article and Part 1 discuss a short play written by the author that can be found in its entirety here. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” ­-Maya Angelou In my last article, I discussed a comedic (and tragic) play I wrote that was produced by my fellow…

Synapsis in Paris: Is an anachronical approach to medico-literary history possible?

Benjamin Gagnon Chainey // As part of the latest CHCI Alliance Medical Humanities Summer School, held last June at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, I presented a paper entitled “Towards a transhistorical medico-literary deconstruction of empathy,” where I conducted a comparative analysis of the bodily, linguistic and epistemological tensions between the concept of “experience”…

The Empathy Chamber

Bennett Kuhn // Around us were dusty stacks of forgotten hardcover books and crowd members circulating in the now-defunct Beaumont Warehouse venue in West Philly. The three-night immersive multimedia art project called Going There was in full swing, and a short queue led up to the table where I sat with two synthesizers welcoming strangers…

The Suffering Caregiver

  Benjamin Gagnon Chainey ‘Is the experience of pain preferable to the anihilation of experience?[1]’ Hervé Guibert, Le mausolée des amants The question posed by Hervé Guibert, a French writer who died in 1991, while he was HIV-positive at the apex of the Western AIDS epidemic, resounds from the darkest areas of his terminal phase….