General Education Requirements
Course Description
Stories are at the core of medical practice, but the skills developed are applicable across disciplines, including technology and business. Storytelling in Medicine is a new Sophomore IntroSem designed to teach skills in multiple modalities of storytelling including narrative, oral, social media, academic presentations and visual arts for different audiences. This seminar combines small groups, interactive workshops, and guest speakers who are experts in their fields of medicine, including Abraham Verghese, MD, author of Cutting for Stone, and Audrey Shafer, MD, poet and director of Stanford’s Medicine and the Muse program. Students will also create their own storytelling project throughout the seminar, developed and edited with peer and teacher support and presented at the end of the course.
Meet the Instructors: Lauren Edwards & Bryant Lin
Lauren Edwards
"I believe in the power of stories to foster empathy for our patients, as well as compassion and wellbeing for ourselves. I created and still run a Narrative Medicine curriculum for Stanford internal medicine residents starting in 2015. I have also created reflective writing curricula for medical students, and writing workshops for faculty. While creative writing is my medium of choice, I am interested in how storytelling in all its forms is at the foundation of medical practice."
Bryant Lin
"Dr. Edwards and I represent both the left and right brain sides of narrative medicine. I have over a decade of experience telling stories about new medical technology both at Stanford and working with startups. Most recently, as the Co-Founder of the Center for Asian Health Research and Education (CARE), I have been working with a movie director to develop a docuseries on Asian Health, hopefully, for eventual distribution on a major streaming service."
Department(s)
Cross-listed Department(s): Lifeworks
