Students minoring in the medical humanities organized the University's first-ever conference on the topic, which included presentations of a variety of student-submitted pieces exploring the intersection of the humanities and medicine.

Titled "Body, Voice, Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Discussion in Medical Humanities," the April event featured a keynote address by Jonathan Adler, associate professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering and Wellesley College, who studies how people make sense of difficult things that happen to them and how that meaning influences mental health, personality and psychotherapy treatment.

The conference was divided into three areas of focus: Body, Voice, and Narrative. For the first panel on "Body: Living with Adversity," Saljooq Asif '15 presented "Deaf Gain in ABC Family's 'Switched at Birth,'" which looked at deafness as a power rather than a disability. The section on "Voice: Cultural Perceptions of Illness" included junior Karolina Mieczkowska's personal memoir—a comic strip on the common scene of people staring at the benign tumor she had as a child—and a presentation by graduate student Emily Simon '15 on the portrayal of identity in photographer Nicholas Nixon's AIDS photography series.

The final section, "Narrative: Healthcare Experiences," included poetry written by Sarah Ramsey '18, based on a letter to her uncle who has early-onset Alzheimer's, and Colleen Brady '16, drawn from her volunteer experience in a hospice.

"Medical humanities has a special ability to bring people together across a variety of fields," said conference co-organizer Katie Carsky '16, a biology major and medical humanities minor. "It is this interdisciplinary nature that allows each of us to look at a particular topic through a new lens. It seems that most people believe that medicine and the humanities naturally repel one another, but by bringing them together, we gain so much more."

By Kathleen Sullivan | News & Public Affairs