Rita Charon
Rita Charon
Section titled “Rita Charon”Background
Section titled “Background”Charon’s training spans two disciplines, and this is central to her work:
- 1978 — MD, Harvard Medical School
- 1999 — PhD in English, Columbia University, concentrating on narratology and the works of Henry James
- Subsequently a long-term faculty member at Columbia, where she is Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor of Medicine
This dual appointment is not incidental — it is the method itself: she brings clinical training and the textual analysis of literary criticism into the same consulting room.
That background determines the character of narrative medicine: it is the training of clinical capacity through literary criticism, rather than the reverse derivation of humanities theory from clinical experience.
Narrative medicine
Section titled “Narrative medicine”In 2000 Charon founded the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia, the earliest institutional home for the field. In 2009 the programme launched the world’s first Master of Science degree in Narrative Medicine.
She subsequently established the concept and the definition of the field through several key publications — see Narrative Medicine.
Selected works
Section titled “Selected works”| Year | Title | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2002 | Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge, co-edited) | Narrative and medical ethics |
| 2006 | Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press) | The foundational monograph |
| 2008 | Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY Press, co-edited) | |
| 2017 | Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press, co-authored) | Practice guide |
Honours and roles
Section titled “Honours and roles”- 2018 — selected for the US National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the endowment’s highest honour in the humanities
- Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency
- Research funding from NIH, NEH, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and others
- Formerly editor-in-chief of the journal Literature and Medicine
Influence
Section titled “Influence”- Medical education: close reading brought into clinical training, making communication a teachable and assessable capacity rather than an intuition
- Clinical research: the framework applied to research on patient experience in chronic illness, critical care and palliative care
- International uptake: introduced into medical education and hospital practice in China, the United Kingdom, Korea and elsewhere, each with a different local path
Related entries
Section titled “Related entries”Maintenance
- Status: Draft — unreviewed
- Maintainer: 医学人文百科 Editorial Team
- Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0