ReMed Summer Fellowship enters final stretch
In the final week of the summer intensive, the Reimagine Medicine (ReMed) fellows are stretching for new ways of thinking about healing, the central characters in the medical narrative, and their (future) role in the process.
Rabbi Steve Sager, as part of the Spirituality series, demonstrated the power of stories to shape our understanding of words like “care and cure,” “heal and whole.” He encouraged students to pay attention to those things they glimpse “out of the corner of the eye” as significant to people’s sense of self and wellness. As part of the History of Medicine series, students researched and reported on clinicians who have re-imagined and thereby changed medicine over the past century—Aaron Moore, Sara Josephine Baker, Cicely Saunders, Charles Drew, Paul Farmer, and Abraham Verghese. TuanDat Nguyen hosted our visit to the North Street Neighborhood, a Durham community where people with and without disabilities live and thrive together. After a tour, pizza lunch, and conversation with residents, we had an impromptu sing-along, including “Lean on Me.”
This week, students are preparing to tell their own stories of how ReMed has sparked their imagination, broadened their perspective, or clarified their view of the future. Songia Wynn, a rising AAAS major from Charlotte, NC, commented on a favorite experience by sharing, “Embodiment and Puppetry was really impactful; it was a novel experience, but I learned a lot from Marina.”
Throughout the program, artists take students outside traditional medical education with sessions on:
- Art & Seeing—fine tuning visual perception by studying paintings and nature
- Medical Improv—using improvisation techniques to develop conversational fluency and responsiveness
- Graphic Medicine—using comics to convey medical concepts and stories, often from the patient’s perspective
- Embodiment & Puppetry—accessing the embodied imagination through movement and puppetry
- Music & Healing—showing and experiencing the power of music to soothe, connect, and heal
The ReMed Summer Fellowship runs through June 14 and more information about the program is available at DukeReMed.org
Reimagine Medicine is a collaboration among the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, Science and Society, Duke Divinity School: Theology, Medicine and Culture, and the FHI Health Humanities Lab.
