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Soluble Fish presents "Pursuing Narrative in Medicine"a talk by Dr. Sharon Baltman
Sunday, October 18, 7:30 PM
Free Times Café, 320 College Street
PWYC
In medical school in the sixties, we were taught to ask the patient for their Chief Complaint, and to clarify it with a series of concrete descriptors in 15 seconds or less. What was not attended to, was the patient’s back story. Only in 2006, Dr. Rita Charon, an internist at Columbia, wrote the first book on Narrative Medicine. In it she teaches that instead of asking the patient to describe the type of pain, its location and intensity, to simply pose the question: “What do I need to know about you?” And then to listen closely to their story, in the same way we would study a piece of art. Narrative Medicine is now on the curriculum of every medical school. Only in retrospect did I realize that the trajectory of my career pursued narrative in medicine.
Sharon Baltman is a retired physician psychotherapist, who began writing creatively in 1992. Her experiences in medicine are represented both in her memoir Escape from The Bedside (2013), and the novel Anne of Oasis (2021), which is informed by the tools she taught patients in the therapy room. She is the author of articles in the Globe and Mail, in literary anthologies, and on CBC Radio, and is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
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Event venue
Free Times Cafe, 320 College Street,Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Tickets
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