Those Who Sow Weeping: Examining Creative Acts of Lament as the Requirement of an Afflicted State
Moderator: John Brewer Eberly, Jr. MD, MA, Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Panelists: Brian Peacock, MMS, PA-C, (Representing Planting Sequoias and Parallel Charts), Rachel Moorman, MMS, PA-C, (Representing Wake Forest Narrative Medicine Certificate Program) and Ethan Stonerook, MS, MMS, PA-C, (Representing the Department of Medical Humanities at the Journal of the American Academy of PAs)
This panel proposes to offer reflections on the following question: How can collective, creative expression heal medicine’s moral imagination in an age of burnout and bureaucratic strain?
Abstract Body:
The clinician-in-training quietly leaves a hospital room in the dark of night. She has just listened to the silent precordium of a woman for whom she has cared for the last several weeks. As a learner, she has had the privilege of spending some of her marginal time with this patient. She has come to know her well. And although she is unable to admit it to herself, she’s been drawn to this particular patient because of a coherence she feels between the patient and the trainee’s late mother. She has lingered in order to wonder. With the patient’s passing, she is afflicted by a burden that requires even more from her than she has already given.
In this discussion, a moderator and three panelists will interrogate the requirements that grief places upon the medical provider. Namely, we will discuss the role of lamentation, and will illustrate three infrastructures of lament that are effective as well as easily adapted to the contexts of medical training and practice.
The moderator, a family physician, writer, and medical educator, will introduce the panelists and give a brief preamble about the role of lament for the spiritual care of the afflicted healer. Drawing on Psalm 126 and poetry of Wendell Berry, the moderator will discuss lament as a creative task in a vocation that affords ever decreasing resources by which we can actually engage in creativity. How does one take the few seeds they have remaining and, by faith, cast them in the soil of the page or canvas? What do we hope this might achieve, and what does it look like in the practical life of a clinician?
Following this, a PA in family practice will discuss a certificate program in narrative medicine which seeks to foster not only narrative competence, but habits and practices of memorializing, celebrating, and lamenting acts of care within the limitations of modern medicine. She will then share a piece of music and writing produced within that program.
Next, a medical educator, editor, and writer in the medical humanities will present an offering of lament followed by discussing the requirement lament places upon those with editorial power and privilege in medical publishing. The panelist will ask questions of purpose, vision, and imaginaries of care as influenced by medical academic publishers.
Finally, a PA program director will offer an expression of lament that was developed as part of a two-year project that aims to form healers with deep capacities of care, attention, and practical wisdom. They will also discuss the agency and call on those with administrative influence to create pedagogies that expect and honor lament as a normative practice for the medical practitioner.
These three panelists will represent situated curricula or structures designed to create space, time, and attention for wrestling with the burdens and limitations that bearing witness places upon the afflicted healer. Beyond the offerings themselves, panelists will also discuss the structures of these curricular efforts as well as the effects they have had upon the panelists and the students and patients they now serve.
Audience Engagement:
The moderator will introduce the panelists and frame the conversation during the first 5-10 minutes. Then each presenter will spend 12-15 minutes sharing an offering of lament followed by a discussion of the curriculum or infrastructure through which that offering was developed. The moderator will then offer several questions to the panelists to engage discussion on the phenomenon and requirement of lament. The panel will conclude with 20 minutes for moderated questions and answers with the audience.
Panelists include faculty who serve roles as in medical practice, medical education and program administration, and editing and publishing for an academic medical journal that prioritizes the medical humanities as playing a foundational role in our vocational identity. The discussion will feature underlying themes of the role of the humanities and creative expression that influence curricula and extracurricular efforts in the classroom, clinical settings, and in publishing.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, attendees will:
Abstract Body:
The clinician-in-training quietly leaves a hospital room in the dark of night. She has just listened to the silent precordium of a woman for whom she has cared for the last several weeks. As a learner, she has had the privilege of spending some of her marginal time with this patient. She has come to know her well. And although she is unable to admit it to herself, she’s been drawn to this particular patient because of a coherence she feels between the patient and the trainee’s late mother. She has lingered in order to wonder. With the patient’s passing, she is afflicted by a burden that requires even more from her than she has already given.
In this discussion, a moderator and three panelists will interrogate the requirements that grief places upon the medical provider. Namely, we will discuss the role of lamentation, and will illustrate three infrastructures of lament that are effective as well as easily adapted to the contexts of medical training and practice.
The moderator, a family physician, writer, and medical educator, will introduce the panelists and give a brief preamble about the role of lament for the spiritual care of the afflicted healer. Drawing on Psalm 126 and poetry of Wendell Berry, the moderator will discuss lament as a creative task in a vocation that affords ever decreasing resources by which we can actually engage in creativity. How does one take the few seeds they have remaining and, by faith, cast them in the soil of the page or canvas? What do we hope this might achieve, and what does it look like in the practical life of a clinician?
Following this, a PA in family practice will discuss a certificate program in narrative medicine which seeks to foster not only narrative competence, but habits and practices of memorializing, celebrating, and lamenting acts of care within the limitations of modern medicine. She will then share a piece of music and writing produced within that program.
Next, a medical educator, editor, and writer in the medical humanities will present an offering of lament followed by discussing the requirement lament places upon those with editorial power and privilege in medical publishing. The panelist will ask questions of purpose, vision, and imaginaries of care as influenced by medical academic publishers.
Finally, a PA program director will offer an expression of lament that was developed as part of a two-year project that aims to form healers with deep capacities of care, attention, and practical wisdom. They will also discuss the agency and call on those with administrative influence to create pedagogies that expect and honor lament as a normative practice for the medical practitioner.
These three panelists will represent situated curricula or structures designed to create space, time, and attention for wrestling with the burdens and limitations that bearing witness places upon the afflicted healer. Beyond the offerings themselves, panelists will also discuss the structures of these curricular efforts as well as the effects they have had upon the panelists and the students and patients they now serve.
Audience Engagement:
The moderator will introduce the panelists and frame the conversation during the first 5-10 minutes. Then each presenter will spend 12-15 minutes sharing an offering of lament followed by a discussion of the curriculum or infrastructure through which that offering was developed. The moderator will then offer several questions to the panelists to engage discussion on the phenomenon and requirement of lament. The panel will conclude with 20 minutes for moderated questions and answers with the audience.
Panelists include faculty who serve roles as in medical practice, medical education and program administration, and editing and publishing for an academic medical journal that prioritizes the medical humanities as playing a foundational role in our vocational identity. The discussion will feature underlying themes of the role of the humanities and creative expression that influence curricula and extracurricular efforts in the classroom, clinical settings, and in publishing.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, attendees will:
- Bear witness to pieces of artistic expression offered as lamentation for particular patients for whom panelists have cared.
- Be able to reflect upon frameworks for lament as offered by the Psalms.
- Be able to discuss small group instructional techniques designed to foster artistic and literary practices of memorialization, celebration, and lament in medicine.
- Be able to discuss the implications of editorial approaches to suffering and lamentation by academic publishers in medicine.