Between Becoming a PA, Surgeon, and Physician: Bread, Beauty, and Belonging as Neglected Features of Professional Identity Formation
Moderator: Benjamin Frush, UNC Chapel Hill, Palliative Care and Hospice Medicine Fellowship Program, Chapel Hill, NC
Presenters: Beatriz Desanti de Oliveira, New York Presbyterian - Columbia University, New York, NY; Brewer Eberly, Fischer Clinic, Raleigh, NC and Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC; Thomas "Clark" Howell, Duke University School of Medicine, Surgical Residency Program, Durham, NC; and Ethan Stonerook, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Department of PA Studies, Winston-Salem, NC
The problems afflicting the moral development and flourishing of clinicians have been well-documented and responded to by secular frameworks of burnout mitigation and wellness enhancement. Such responses fall short in their goal due to their inability to attend to or even perceive the anthropological nature of the trainees they seek to nourish.
Our goal in this panel is to 1) describe four independently developed initiatives for the moral formation and care of clinicians which have been implemented across various medical education settings 2) discuss how each of these initiatives emerged from a shared Christian understanding of the incarnation as a moral imaginary for curricular design and 3) discuss the three anthropological needs of trainees which we have co-identified through that shared vision. We will discuss how, in our very different individual contexts, communities, and curricula, the threefold, incarnationally coherent model of “bread, beauty, and belonging” has manifested in efforts for the whole-person formation of medical students, surgical residents, physician assistants, internal medicine residents, and clinicians outside of training.
First, bread. Medical training curricula, despite the daily exposure to and care of broken bodies, is often built around a one-dimensional, intellectually focused Cartesian anthropology, creating a particularly disembodied experience for trainees. Trainees are immersed in environments that often treat patients as machines and are themselves treated as machines—machines that must “process" all the information they receive, "recharge", and "unplug" when they can.
Panelists will describe how their programs take seriously the role of physical nourishment, hospitality, and rest in order to help trainees remember themselves as interdependent individuals, embodied in physical creatureliness and human finitude. As Christ ate and drank, so we eat and drink together. As Christ is mysteriously made know in the breaking of the bread in Luke 24, so are we revealed to each other and recognized anew as we sit with one another over a shared meal.
Second, beauty. The innate human need to pursue the beautiful can be stultified in the process of medical training, where the rigors placed on trainees demand the prioritization of cognitive knowledge domains (pragmatism and maximum production) over affective and psychomotor domains. Panelists will describe how engagement with different forms of the beautiful (poetry, visual art, ballet, bread-baking, music, sketching, contemplative prayer) helps to develop habits of noticing and honoring the beauty of their own existence as well as the beauty of those they care for on a daily basis in contexts that are often aesthetically unappealing. As Christ is, for the Christian, Word made flesh, the image of the supremely Beautiful, so do we look to beauty to awaken our hearts and charge our affections to work, worship, and wonder.
Third, belonging. Medical training can have an anonymizing effect upon trainees, creating a culture in which each individual strives for competence in a system that requests relatively interchangeable objects of labor. Each of these programs, in its own way, takes seriously the importance of identifying and celebrating the unique and individuating features of participants in the form of mentorship and friendship. These initiatives understand medical trainees not as cogs in a machine, but as creatures who issue forth along their relationships, and therefore are resistant to the language of typical wellness initiatives and professional identity formation that is so often aimed at the self-actualization of the isolated individual. As Christ claims to be the vine and Christians the branches, so do we recognize our individual neighbors and trainees as members of other bodies and communities that make possible their life and work.
The panelists include assistant professor Ethan Stonerook, MS, MPAS, PA-C representing the a program for moral formation in physician assistant students at Wake Forest University, internist Beatriz Desanti de Oliveira representing the Columbia Character Cooperative, family physician Brewer Eberly representing the Phronesis project: a forum for medical student formation and The Healer's Vocation: A Small Group for Christians in Health Care, and surgical resident Clark Howell representing The Project on the Good Surgeon at Duke. Meds-peds physician and palliative fellow at UNC Ben Frush will moderate.
While this panel will feature a short description of each of these four programs, our goal is not to showcase individual curricula, but rather to reflect on a shared theological foundation, rooted in the incarnation, and to discuss how this shared understanding has manifested in four distinct projects; these being united by an attention to beauty, bread, and belonging.