Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., assisted by Robert Crocker, MD and Barbara Mainguy, MFA.                        

COURSE SYLLABUS

Course Description:We are going to explore health, wellness, disease, and illness from a narrative perspective. We will consider the linkage between story and body.  We will explore the neuroscience of story and metaphor and will draw upon a mixture of case studies, scientific research papers, novels and memoirs to investigate health and disease. We will ask how a narrative perspective would change the practice of medicine. We will explore how to use story effectively in a health care context. We will wonder how history-taking can produce better narratives.

Course Objectives:·         Students will describe how a narrative perspective on health and disease is different from the conventional biomedical approach.·   Students will list ways in which story and physiology are related.·  Students will describe ways in which story can be used in the clinical setting.·   Students will improve their capacity to evoke a narrative from a patient.·         Students will improve their ability to write medical narratives.

Overview of Course Content:Class Format: The class began with a weekend face-to-face experiential workshop and continues with 90 minutes weekly for three months of internet face to face contact and additional asynchronous discussion via a web discussion group.

Books: Narrative Medicine: the use of history and story in the healing process, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Rochester, Vermont: Bear and Company, 2007.Meaning-full Illness, Brian Broom, London: Routledge, 2006.Narrative Medicine,

Rita Charone, New York: Bantam, 2006.

An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks

Sacks, Oliver (1987). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Harper Perennial: New York.  

Novels:

The Echo Maker, Richard PowersBanishing Verona, Margot LiveseyThe Missing World, Margot LiveseyMemoirs:In The Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot (Memory)A World of Light, Floyd Skloot (Light)

Class Format:  Lewis will lead a real-time discussion of Narrative Medicine each week that will be aided by participants doing the reading.  We will read a chapter of each of the three books for each week plus additional readings that may be put up on the website.

Additional Reading Assignments (not all extra readings are posted yet; some will be posted as we go, depending upon the direction that our discussions take):

Week 1: Preface and Introductory Material to Each of the 3 books.Sacks, Oliver (1987). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Harper Perennial: New York. Preface, Introduction & Title ChapterMunro, Alice (1999). The Bear Came Over the Mountain. The New Yorker. Available on the archive

Week 2: Watch the movie, Roshomon.

Week 3:Sacks, Anthropologist on Mars, To See and Not See, The Case of the Colorblind Painter, The Landscape of His DreamsWatch the movie, Ten Canoes

Week 4: Watch the movie, Travelers and Magicians

Week 5: 1. Skloot, Floyd (2003). In the Shadow of Memory.2. Livesey, Margot (2000). The Missing World, Chapters 1-7.

Week 6: Skloot, Floyd (2005). A World of Light. Preface; part one: 1-4; part two: 6 & 9; part three: 14 & 15.

Week 7: Week 8: 1. Sacks, Oliver (1995). An Anthropologist on Mars, Title Chapter & Prodigies (watch the Stephen Wiltshire video on YouTube in connection with ‘Prodigies’).2. Livesey, Margot, (2005). Banishing Verona.

Week 9: Week 10: Powers, Richard (2006). The Echo Maker. Part One: I Am No One.

Week 11: Powers, The Echo Maker. Part Two: But Tonight on North Line Road and Part 3: God Led Me To You.

Week 12:Week 13:Sacks, Anthropologist on Mars, A Surgeon’s Life.Cassuto, Leonard (2000). Oliver Sacks: the P.T. Barnum of the Postmodern World?, American Quarterly, 52.2, 326-333. Available in Project Muse at http://remote.slc.edu:2075/journals/american_quarterly/v052/52.2cassuto.pdfCouser, G. Thomas (2001). The Cases of Oliver Sacks: The Ethics of Neuroanthropology. Available online at http://poynter.indiana.edu/publications/m-couser.pdf

Course Requirements/Methods of Evaluation:·       

Attendance and Participation: Particpants will be expected to participate in weekly discussion groups or, if unable to do so on a given week, to watch the recorded discussion and to comment on the class discussion group.  Students are expected to start one discussion each week and to join into four other discussions.  The discussions may flow from the readings or from participants’ experiences in introducing narrative concepts into their practices.·        

Paper:   Students will write a paper on some aspect of Narrative Medicine.  We will work together until the paper is ready to submit to a journal.·        

Case Study:  Students will write a 2000 to 3000 word narrative of a person with an illness in the spirit of Oliver Sachs. Preferably this will be a person from the participant’s own practice who has been narrativized.

Credit/No Credit:

Students get credit when they finish the requirements of the course.  At this point (October 2009) credit is toward the certificate program offered through the Center for Narrative Studies of the Coyote Institute for Stujdies of Change and Transformation.  We welcome working with participant’s home institutions to arrange for credit of other types to be available.

This is the first course offered by Coyote Institute, a new not-for-profit corporation that was the brainchild of my friend Dr. Robert Crocker and I.  We are starting the Institute to be able to conduct research into Hocokah (or healing circles) and to offer online courses in narrative and indigenous healing.