Marcia Childress and Hunter Groninger present at special convening on human suffering

 

Marcia Day Childress PhD participated in On Suffering: Pain, Precarity, and the Distintegration of the Self, a multidisciplinary, invitation-only meeting convened by Professor Ato Quayson at New York University on 18-19 April 2019. Her presentation, “’Your pain is painful to behold’: Arts-Based Initiatives to Help Health Professional Students Recognize and Respond to Human Suffering,” referenced innovative curricular projects at UVA that use theater and visual art to help medical and nursing students cultivate certain core patient care skills. One such project is HeArt of Medicine, the student-led initiative that employs visual art to foster learning and reflection about death and dying, loss, grief, and end-of-life care.

Affiliate faculty member Hunter Groninger MD, associate professor of clinical medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine and director of the palliative care section at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, also spoke at this NYU conference: “’To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters!’ The Evolving Concept of ‘Total Pain’ and Clinical Approaches to Human Suffering.”