Creative Medicine Series

Initiated with gracious support from the Creative Arts Council, as well as the generosity of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School and the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown, this series has engaged a diverse audience from BioMed, the College, and the surrounding community.

Please visit the the Cogut Center for the Humanities for more information about the series.

Julie Strandberg is Senior Lecturer and founding director of dance in the Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and co-founder of the American Dance Legacy Initiative housed at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

Rachel Balaban is Adjunct Lecturer at Brown University in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. She is Co-Founder and Co-Director of ASaP, Artists and Scientists as Partners, an organization housed at Brown University that facilitates educational programs on the topic of arts and health, working with both medical and arts practitioners to foster creative, integrative health practices. Rachel is Dance for PD (Parkinson’s Disease) Coordinator in Connecticut and Rhode Island and regularly teaches People with Parkinson’s and their caregivers. A lifelong teacher, dancer, artist and designer, she is also a certified instructor in Shake Your Soul/Kripalu YogaDance and leads movement classes and workshops for schools, faculty, foundations and corporations.

Jane Hesser, MFA, MSW is a psychiatric clinical social worker, artist and teacher with a longstanding interest in the pedagogy of critical thinking. She has specific interest in the power of art-inclusive interdisciplinary study to develop the ability to think critically. Jane is currently Clinical Care Coordinator in the Department of Women's Behavioral Health at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence. She provides comprehensive psychiatric evaluations, individual and group psychotherapy and triage for pregnant and postpartum women. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and taught art at the college level for many years at schools including Montserrat College of Art, Brown University and RISD. She has a Certificate in Collegiate Teaching from Brown's Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, where she was also a teaching consultant. She has written and delivered talks on the intersection between psychology, critique and the development of critical thinking skills in college level art education. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the country.

Creative Medicine Series 2013-2014

Steven Rougas, MD is currently an Emergency Medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital. He is a native of Cranston, RI and attended Providence College. As an undergraduate he double-majored in Biochemistry and Music Performance with a focus on classical piano under the tutelage of Professor Rosalind Chua. He went on to complete medical school and residency training in Emergency Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Currently he serves as a Medical Education Research Fellow and is completing a Master’s in Medical Education and Leadership. Dr. Rougas teaches in the Doctoring Course at AMS and outside of medicine, enjoys performing with the Odyssey Dance Troupe, a local Greek folk dance troupe which he directs.

Catherine Belling, PhD, is on the faculty of the Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. She is the author of A Condition of Doubt: On the Meanings of Hypochondria (Oxford University Press, 2012) and her current book project revisits the history of bioethics in the 1970s through the lens of popular medical suspense fiction and film.

Her current research concerns contemporary fears of disease and of health care, connections between anxiety and interpretation in fiction, medicine, and bioethics, and disciplinary questions surrounding the medical humanities as an academic field. Her work has been published in Genre, Narrative, Literature and Medicine, the Journal of Medical Humanities, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, Academic Medicine, as well as in several edited collections, including The Body in Medical Culture (ed. Klaver, SUNY Press, 2009) and Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (ed. Moss and Peterson, Ashgate, 2004). Her essay, "Narrative Oncogenesis: The Problem of Telling when Cancer Begins” (Narrative 18 [2010] 229-247), won the 2010 Schachterle Essay Prize awarded by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

She is presently the Executive Editor of the journal Literature and Medicine.

Liz Tobin Tyler, JD, MA, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Health Services, Policy and Practice at Alpert Medical School, where she serves as the co-director of the Scholarly Concentration in Advocacy and Activism.

She is the former Director of Public Service and Community Partnerships and a Lecturer in Public Interest Law at Roger Williams University School of Law. Since 2003, she has taught a joint medical-legal course with faculty from the Alpert Medical School on the social determinants of health and the law. Ms. Tobin Tyler is a national leader in the development of medical-legal partnerships which provide legal assistance and promote policy changes to improve the health of vulnerable patients. She is the senior editor of Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, published by Carolina Academic Press in 2011. She is Chair of the Board of Directors for the Rhode Island Medical-Legal Partnership and also serves on the Board of Directors for the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership in Washington, DC.

Prior to her work at Roger Williams University School of Law, Ms. Tobin Tyler served as a consulting attorney to Health and Education Leadership for Providence on childhood lead paint poisoning and housing code issues, and served as a policy analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count, a child advocacy and policy organization. From 2000-2004, she was a visiting lecturer at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy where she taught family law and policy. She is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and holds an MA in English and a BA in humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.

Creative Medicine Series 2012-2013

Alexa Miller, MA, is a recognized expert in aligning medical training with visual art with nearly a decade of experience working with hospitals, medical schools and other health care organizations to develop museum-based workshops and programs. Alexa specializes in connecting clinical learning with arts learning methodologies, including Visual Thinking Strategies, shown to improve critical thinking, language, and aesthetic skills through art.

Creative Medicine Series 2011-2012

Ana Blohm, MD, internist and photographer, is an assistant professor of medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, a physician in Mount Sinai's Visiting Doctors Program, and co-director of the Humanities and Medicine Program in the Division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Blohm discussed the visual arts and medicine and the ethically complex relationship between photography and medicine.

Katie Watson, JD, is a bioethicist and lawyer who is assistant professor in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. She is also adjunct faculty at the Second City Theater Training Center where she teaches improv and sketch writing. She created a popular "medical improv" seminar applying the principles that she has taught Northwestern medical students since 2002. Her lecture introduced the principles of improv as an art form, explored their relevance to clinical skills, and considered data on medical students' reactions to her medical improv seminar.

Deb Salem Smith is the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company. Her play Love Alone received an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award to support its premiere at Trinity Rep during the 2011-2012 season. Love Alone also was recognized with an Honorable Mention by the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. Her previous honors include an Emerging American Artist Fulbright for playwriting in Dublin, Ireland, where she worked with the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater, and served as a Visiting Academic at the Trinity College School of Drama. Her work has been recognized by a National Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Colby Fellowship, a Major Hopwood Award, as well as writing and visual arts prizes from the University of Michigan and Princeton University. Her other plays include: Boots on the Ground, Some Things Are Private, Good Business, and Caviar.

Creative Medicine Series 2010-2011

Jack Coulehan, MD, MPH, Emeritus Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University and author of numerous written works of prose and poetry including Medicine Stone (2002), was our first guest artist. Dr Coulehan's most recent works are the fifth edition of The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills for Clinical Practice (2005), a best-selling text on the clinician-patient relationship; and Primary Care, an anthology of poems by physicians (2006) co-edited with Angela Belli. During Dr Coulehan's visit to Brown, he hosted a lunchtime creative workshop with medical students that was highly regarded. He also gave an evening poetry reading to a captive audience, sharing his experiences as a physician over several decades. At dinner following the event, Dr Coulehan shared with the faculty members who were present his thoughts on creating a medical arts and humanities program as he has had experience with this at his home institution.

David Biro, MD, visited in February. Dr Biro is an Associate Professor of Dermatology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches in the medical humanities division there, directing a course on medicine and literature. Dr Biro transformed his personal misfortune of a suffering through a horrific illness into a forum to develop a language for patients and healthcare providers to discuss the nebulous idea of 'pain. He has recorded those lessons in his book, The Language of Pain (2010), from which he shared excerpts during his evening lecture. The entire audience was touched by his words, both healthcare providers and laypeople as the two worlds had been brought together by this physician-artist. Before his talk, Dr. Biro led students in a discussion on the benefits and pitfalls of patient narratives in Dr. Baruch's Pragmatic Medical Humanities seminar.

Nellie Hermann, MFA, who works as a writing teacher in the esteemed Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University Medical School, shared her work with us in March. Ms. Hermann works daily with physicians and medical students, helping them to create reflective, humanistic pieces that enhance their care for patients. The writing samples she shared, both her own and anonymously some of her students, were moving pieces and reinforced how humanistic efforts can better the practice of medicine. Before her talk, Ms. Hermann joined Dr. Baruch's Pragmatic Medical Humanities seminar to discuss the importance of creativity in medicine.

Liz Mitchell, MD, an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center, capped off our series with her wonderful piano performance. Dr Mitchell writes pieces about patient and personal experiences that touch her and she moved her audience deeply with both the words she sang and the notes she played. Her work reminds us as healthcare providers of the duty we have to care for the whole patient. Dr Mitchell shared stories of playing songs for the patients she has written them about, and how she deeply touching them by caring about them as a person, not just for them as a patient. The evening was a beautiful representation of how creativity, imagination and music can heal the practice of medicine.