Rita Charon
Biographic Data
| ID | 1082887 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rita Charon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rita |
| FAMILY NAME | Charon |
| SIGNATURE | CHARON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6003-5219 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Literature and Medicine 2000–2007
Literature and Medicine 2000–2007 Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) Our co-editorial retrospect on Literature and Medicine from 2000 to 2007 exposes major conceptual and disciplinary breakthroughs that, at the time, were of course invisible. We can see now how significant a role L&M played in the emergence and development of the genre of illness narratives, which by 2022 has emerged as one of the towering developments not only in literatu…
Writing our Lives to Live Them: The Cognitive Forms of a Narrative Medicine
Life-writing combines, collates, or colludes many lives into one text. No work of fiction, biography, poetry, drama, memoir, journaling, blogging, or autobiography—all of them life-writing—does not do this, either blatantly or surreptitiously. I am interested in forms in which authors do not own up to writing about themselves under the cover of writing about another. This essay will focus on the implications of this generic collusion in writing i…
Racial Justice in Medicine: Narrative Practices toward Equity
In an age of police violence against Black persons and their mass incarceration, Americans seek a "public sphere" in which to examine the torn fabric of race relations. To date, efforts to overcome centuries-long polarizations and to find collective avenues toward racial justice have had little success. This essay proposes that narrative engagement and creative discovery can open paths toward mutual comprehension, if not reconciliation, in the sp…
Reading the Self: Medical Students’ Experience of Reflecting on Their Writing Over Time
PURPOSE: To investigate students' experience (over time) with meta-reflection writing exercises, called Signature Reflections. These exercises were used to strengthen reflective capacity, as part of a 4-year reflective writing portfolio curriculum that builds on a recognized strategy for reflection (narrative medicine) and employs longitudinal faculty-mentors. METHOD: In 2018, the authors conducted 5 focus groups with 18 third-year students from …
How does faculty development innovation cross cultures: Adapting narrative medicine to Asia
"How does faculty development innovation cross cultures?: Adapting narrative medicine to Asia." Medical Teacher, 43(8), pp. 908–909
Observing the World as Dancers Do: Teaching Dance to Medical Students
On a sunny day in a studio overlooking the Hudson River, a Mark Morris dancer guides a group of medical students in choreographing their patients’ stories. This class in narrative medicine provides a safe laboratory where doctors-to-be learn to view their relationships with future patients as an improvisatory partnered dance in which the choreography adjusts moment to moment as new challenges, details, and possibilities for healing emerge
Spoken Body
The linguistic, rhetorical, and metaphorical powers of language profoundly influence events of health care. Physicians are professionalized into their own isolating language at the cost of fluency in their native tongue. Translation is always inadequate. Physicians resort to ironizing detachment from patients to delude themselves that they will not sicken and die. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and the Wittgensteinian and enactive/embodied …
Narrative Reciprocity
I have become curious about reciprocity within clinical practice. A vast topic that mobilizes considerations of money, knowledge, kinship, power, culture, and uses of the body, reciprocity is a strong means by which to achieve the egality required of just health care. Within health care, reciprocity might enable not only so‐called shared decision‐making and patient autonomy. It might appear as a humble realization that no one understands what hea…
The Author Replies
Reply to a commentary by Alan Fine
Narrative medicine as a means of training medical students toward residency competencies
Interim Editor's Preface
Interim Editor's Preface Rita Charon I come again to be the Editor of this journal, if only for one issue, upon the sudden illness of the sitting Executive Editor Charles Anderson. Rhetorician and scholar in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Anderson has been our shepherd and muse since he ascended to the Editorship in 2007. He is known for his scholarly parsing of the works of Richard Selzer and for…
Editors' Preface: Narrative Medicine, or a Sense of Story
Literature and medicine, as a field of inquiry and practice, has led to important changes in the lived experience of illness and the day-to-day enterprise of caring for those who seek health care. The clinical legacy of literature and medicine begins from a ground-floor recognition that experiencing and treating sickness are language-using events. From here, we move spirally toward original sightings of the deep events of illness, health, and car…
Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness , and: Illness and the Limits of Expression (review)
Reviewed by: Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness, and: Illness and the Limits of Expression Rita Charon (bio) Lisa Diedrich. Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-4698-2, $67.50. Kathlyn Conway. Illness and the Limits of Expression. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 158 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-11619-5, $50.00. Scholarly and creative writing about …
Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness
Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognise, absorb, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness. By…
Of Torches, Traditions, Pastures, and Pride
Editor's Preface:Of Torches, Traditions, Pastures, and Pride Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) This double-sized issue of Literature and Medicine proudly marks the journal's anniversary of twenty-five years in print. This celebratory issue is not only the largest we have published in our tenures as editors-in-chief, it is also our last, as, with its completion, we turn the editorship of Literature and Medicine over to Charles Anderson at …
The Perilous Fate of the Teller, or What Bench? What Desolation
Henry James's understanding of the perilous consequences of telling of the situation of another seem salient to the clinical enterprise. This essay examines James's late story "The Bench of Desolation" to appreciate the narrative strategies adopted in its telling. The narrator of this story gradually nears the suffering protagonist and shifts from mockery to seeming compassion in the presentation of his plight. By effacing himself, or making hims…
Editors' Preface: Reflexivity and Responsiveness: The Expansive Orbit of Knowledge
Editors' Preface:Reflexivity and Responsiveness: The Expansive Orbit of Knowledge Maura Spiegel and Rita Charon As we continue to explore how stories work, and the work that stories do in the sphere of medicine, we find, in this issue of Literature and Medicine, a special emphasis on how narratives function in the construction of knowledge—how we explain, how we establish and assert our claims to understanding and mastery. In the realm of diagnos…
The self-telling body
This essay will examine some of the narrative practices emerging in the health care professions — medicine, nursing, social work, and psychotherapy. We have always, of course, understood that the most fertile and clinically salient information we derive about patients comes from listening to them talking about their illnesses. Nonetheless, medicine’s recent past is marked by not so much a suspicion of as a dismissal of word in diagnosing and trea…
Framing the Conversation on Speechlessness, Testimony, and Indifference
Framing the Conversation on Speechlessness, Testimony, and Indifference The Editors, Rita Charon, and Maura Spiegel Part of literature and medicine's growth in the past few years has occurred in the area of bearing witness to suffering. Private and public, individual and cultural, the giving of testimony and bearing witness to it have occupied clinicians, activists, scholars, teachers, and writers who are coming gradually to see the urgency of te…
On Conveying Pain/On Conferring Form
On Conveying Pain/On Conferring Form Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel It feels to us immediate and urgent to present a special issue of Literature and Medicine on narrative, pain, and suffering. As one of the enduring commitments and justifications of our field, trying to understand the words with which sufferers register their experience consumes and probably unites the clinicians and the scholars in the field. To find or be reached by language tha…
The Narrative Imperative and the Ethics of Listening
Editors' Preface:The Narrative Imperative and the Ethics of Listening Maura Spiegel and Rita Charon "I commend these words to you . . ." In this issue, perhaps more than any in recent memory, the farthest-reaching implications of this project of bringing together the worlds of literature and medicine are realized. This issue widens the lens beyond the medical sphere of suffering to encompass narrative imperatives regarding torture, human rights a…
Personal Illness Narratives: Using Reflective Writing to Teach Empathy
Reflective writing is one established method for teaching medical students empathetic interactions with patients. Most such exercises rely on students' reflecting upon clinical experiences. To effectively elicit, interpret, and translate the patient's story, however, a reflective practitioner must also be self-aware, personally and professionally. Race, gender, and other embodied sources of identity of practitioners and patients have been shown t…
Editors' Preface: Narrative, Empathy, Proximity
Editors' Preface:Narrative, Empathy, Proximity Maura Spiegel and Rita Charon "The feelings that concern psychoanalysis are always feelings enmeshed in stories." Nancy Chodorow, The Powers of Feelings In one inflection, narrative is the medium we exist in; the air we breathe; it is how the mind makes sense of things, interprets stimuli. In this formulation, we must become conscious of the ways in which we are claimed by and make claims according t…
Editors' Preface: Discursive Bodies, Embodied Text
Eventually we will understand how grave a lesion in human consciousness was committed by René Descartes. To have sectioned off the body from the self has obscured a primary source of wisdom about individuals, about earthly events, and about the so-called human condition. A middle-aged woman patient remarked to me [Rita] about her depression: "It all feels so biological," meaning, I assumed, that it felt like the kind of depression that should be …
Editors' Preface
Editing a journal rewards the time and effort it entails because, in part, doing so alerts the editors to the emerging and urgent thoughts of their communities of readers. We ourselves had been brooding about such forces as distance, nearness, and aesthetic mediation in the face of bodily suffering and were gratified and nourished by several submissions to this issue that treat these phenomena. We find ourselves reading several of the enclosed pa…
Ageism in the medical encounter: An Exploratory Study of the Doctor-Elderly Patient Relationship
The self-telling body
This essay will examine some of the narrative practices emerging in the health care professions — medicine, nursing, social work, and psychotherapy. We have always, of course, understood that the most fertile and clinically salient information we derive about patients comes from listening to them talking about their illnesses. Nonetheless, medicine’s recent past is marked by not so much a suspicion of as a dismissal of word in diagnosing and trea…
Older patient satisfaction with communication during an initial medical encounter
Narrative medicine as a means of training medical students toward residency competencies
Multi-dimensional interaction analysis: A collaborative approach to the study of medical discourse
The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics
The visual arts and medical education
Images of illness
Creativity and disease
To Render the Lives of Patients
To Render the Lives of Patients* Rita Charon This is die first CPMC [Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center] admission for this eighty-diree-year-old woman with a chief complaint of syncope. The patient was well prior to admission with no history of heart disease, diabetes, seizure disorder, stroke, or odier neurological abnormality . She was on no known medication and she neither drank alcohol nor used illicit substances. On die afternoon of admis…
Ageism in the medical encounter: An Exploratory Study of the Doctor-Elderly Patient Relationship
The Great Empty Cup of Attention: The Doctor and the Illness in The Wings of the Dove
James confers on his characters his deepest fears and truths. He incorporates within his writing both his stunning and at times crippling intellectual powers and his dark inchoate mournful passion and remorse. The very events that made him a casualty are the experiences he grants to his characters to endure, to grapple with, and to master. In Wings James settles with his characters and with his readers the effects of these two deaths in his life.…
To Build a Case: Medical Histories as Traditions in Conflict
To Build a Case: Medical Histories as Traditions in Conflict Rita Charon [T]he question may be raised whether the different aspects of social life (including even art and religion) cannot only be studied by the methods of, and with the help of concepts similar to those employed in linguistics, but also whether they do not constitute phenomena whose inmost nature is the same as that of language.1 Medical practice relies on the incantation, the wor…
Medical Interpretation: Implications of Literary Theory of Narrative for Clinical Work
Literary narrative theory offers robust conceptual frameworks for understand-ing the act of writing, the act of reading, the configuration of plot, and the narrative contract that binds writer and reader together. This article applies some current theoretical approaches used in studying literary storytelling to the storytelling that takes place in the doctor's office, conceptualizing the patient as the writer or teller and the doctor as the reade…
Multi-dimensional interaction analysis: A collaborative approach to the study of medical discourse
Older patient satisfaction with communication during an initial medical encounter
The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics
Patients and Doctors: Life-Changing Stories from Primary Care (review)
This remarkable collection of medical narratives gives great hope to the strained and unduly restrained medicine of today. Forty-seven family physicians and family therapists write about clinical experiences with individual patients. Clustered into sections with such themes as heroism, secrets, abuse, and suicide, and introduced by perceptive conceptual comments, the stories reflect the intimacy and wonder that can be derived from general practic…
Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust
The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is proposed as a model for humane and effective medical practice. Adopting methods such as close reading of literature and reflective writing allows narrative medicine to examine and illuminate 4 of medicine's…
In Memoriam: Elizabeth Sewell
Literature and Medicine - Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2001
Editors' Preface
We are proud and happy to bring to you the first issue of Literature and Medicine assembled under our joint editorship. The tremendous heritage of the editorships of Anne Hudson Jones and Suzanne Poirier grounds us in the tradition and the collective wisdom of this generative, now established field of literature and medicine. We feel Professors Jones and Poirier had the difficult, uphill task of justification, while we can coast on the certainty …
Editors' Preface
Editing a journal rewards the time and effort it entails because, in part, doing so alerts the editors to the emerging and urgent thoughts of their communities of readers. We ourselves had been brooding about such forces as distance, nearness, and aesthetic mediation in the face of bodily suffering and were gratified and nourished by several submissions to this issue that treat these phenomena. We find ourselves reading several of the enclosed pa…
Editors' Preface: Discursive Bodies, Embodied Text
Eventually we will understand how grave a lesion in human consciousness was committed by René Descartes. To have sectioned off the body from the self has obscured a primary source of wisdom about individuals, about earthly events, and about the so-called human condition. A middle-aged woman patient remarked to me [Rita] about her depression: "It all feels so biological," meaning, I assumed, that it felt like the kind of depression that should be …
Personal Illness Narratives: Using Reflective Writing to Teach Empathy
Reflective writing is one established method for teaching medical students empathetic interactions with patients. Most such exercises rely on students' reflecting upon clinical experiences. To effectively elicit, interpret, and translate the patient's story, however, a reflective practitioner must also be self-aware, personally and professionally. Race, gender, and other embodied sources of identity of practitioners and patients have been shown t…
Editors' Preface: Narrative, Empathy, Proximity
Editors' Preface:Narrative, Empathy, Proximity Maura Spiegel and Rita Charon "The feelings that concern psychoanalysis are always feelings enmeshed in stories." Nancy Chodorow, The Powers of Feelings In one inflection, narrative is the medium we exist in; the air we breathe; it is how the mind makes sense of things, interprets stimuli. In this formulation, we must become conscious of the ways in which we are claimed by and make claims according t…
Framing the Conversation on Speechlessness, Testimony, and Indifference
Framing the Conversation on Speechlessness, Testimony, and Indifference The Editors, Rita Charon, and Maura Spiegel Part of literature and medicine's growth in the past few years has occurred in the area of bearing witness to suffering. Private and public, individual and cultural, the giving of testimony and bearing witness to it have occupied clinicians, activists, scholars, teachers, and writers who are coming gradually to see the urgency of te…
On Conveying Pain/On Conferring Form
On Conveying Pain/On Conferring Form Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel It feels to us immediate and urgent to present a special issue of Literature and Medicine on narrative, pain, and suffering. As one of the enduring commitments and justifications of our field, trying to understand the words with which sufferers register their experience consumes and probably unites the clinicians and the scholars in the field. To find or be reached by language tha…
The Narrative Imperative and the Ethics of Listening
Editors' Preface:The Narrative Imperative and the Ethics of Listening Maura Spiegel and Rita Charon "I commend these words to you . . ." In this issue, perhaps more than any in recent memory, the farthest-reaching implications of this project of bringing together the worlds of literature and medicine are realized. This issue widens the lens beyond the medical sphere of suffering to encompass narrative imperatives regarding torture, human rights a…
Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness
Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognise, absorb, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness. By…
Of Torches, Traditions, Pastures, and Pride
Editor's Preface:Of Torches, Traditions, Pastures, and Pride Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) This double-sized issue of Literature and Medicine proudly marks the journal's anniversary of twenty-five years in print. This celebratory issue is not only the largest we have published in our tenures as editors-in-chief, it is also our last, as, with its completion, we turn the editorship of Literature and Medicine over to Charles Anderson at …
The Perilous Fate of the Teller, or What Bench? What Desolation
Henry James's understanding of the perilous consequences of telling of the situation of another seem salient to the clinical enterprise. This essay examines James's late story "The Bench of Desolation" to appreciate the narrative strategies adopted in its telling. The narrator of this story gradually nears the suffering protagonist and shifts from mockery to seeming compassion in the presentation of his plight. By effacing himself, or making hims…
Psychology (33 works) · Empathy and Medical Education (30 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Narrative (22 works) · Art (19 works) · Literature (19 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychoanalysis (14 works) · Law (13 works)