Events

Early Bird Registration is now open! Join us for our fall basic workshop held in-person at Columbia University Irving Medical Center! Come spend the weekend with us in New York for an immersive and intimate introduction to narrative medicine theory and practice! Our intensive workshop content will provide an immersive introductory experience to the methods and skills of narrative medicine and will offer rigorous skill-building in narrative practices. Interactive presentations by Division of Narrative Medicine faculty, including co-authors of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, will combine with group discussions, creative projects, and transformative small group work.  Tuition rates, preliminary schedule, travel information, and details about our discount for cohorts can be found on our event page at the link above! Workshop Description & Objectives Narrative medicine recognizes the aesthetic capabilities of its practitioners as fundamental instruments necessary for effective care. Acts of perception and attention ignite our narrative practice. Seeing, hearing, sensing, taking in that which we witness begins the process toward healing, and narrative medicine training attunes us to those skills within ourselves. We grow toward our own powers to attend to our patients through the schooled avenues of close reading, deep listening, and concentrated witnessing of works of art. This intensive workshop will offer rigorous skill-building in narrative competence and provides an intensive introductory experience to the methods and skills of narrative medicine. These practices are then applicable to unlimited clinical and non-clinical settings. Participants will experience plenary presentations by the founders of the Division of Narrative Medicine and will engage with faculty and each other for interactive presentations, Q&A, and small group work. Participants will learn effective techniques for attentive listening, adopting others’ perspectives, accurate representation, and reflective reasoning. Plenary presentations by faculty open up themes of how stories and art work, exploring concepts such as creativity, ethics, bearing witness, and empathy, while the small groups practice rigorous skills in close reading, creative writing, and responding to the writings of others. Close reading is an integral part of the workshop as is short prompted writing and discussion. Participants will gain access to online resources prior to the start of the workshop where all information necessary and required to prepare for the weekend is provided, including literary texts, film, visual art, and seminar articles in the field of narrative medicine by leading educators. Come work and study with us in-person in New York City for a weekend. Connect with colleagues from the world over to learn the narrative skills of close reading, attentive listening, and creative writing. Find out how your own imagination can reveal things you know unawares. Experience the deep bonds that can form among clinicians and those who care about health care in short periods of small group intensive narrative work. Recognize and be recognized as ones who have care within them.

The Department of Anesthesiology welcomes Daniel I. Sessler, MD, Michael Cudahy Professor and Chair of the Department of Outcomes Research at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Sessler will present "Perioperative Myocardial Injury." Dr. Sessler attended medical school at Columbia University, and subsequently completed pediatric and anesthesia residencies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published a book on therapeutic hypothermia and more than 950 full research papers including two-dozen in the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet. More than 125 of his papers were accompanied by editorials, and more than 30 were cover articles for major anesthesia journals since 2010. His papers have been cited 60,000 times in peer-reviewed articles per Scopus — making him the world’s most published and cited anesthesiologist. He is among the top 0.01% of cited scientists in any field. Dr. Sessler founded and directs the Outcomes Research Consortium. The Consortium is the world’s largest anesthesia research group, and publishes a full paper every other day, for a total of more than 1,900 papers.