May Virtual Narrative Medicine Rounds: Join us on Zoom!

We are excited to announce that we will hold our May Narrative Medicine rounds with Liana Finck live via Zoom​, hosted by Benjamin Schwartz!

Due to additional scheduling changes made necessary by the developing COVID-19 situation, for our May Narrative Medicine Rounds we are delighted to welcome cartoonist Liana Finck to join us even sooner than expected. Her work appears regularly in the New Yorker and on her Instagram feed, and her most recent publications include a graphic novel entitled Passing for Human, and the cartoon collection Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints and Notes to Self.

In a review of Passing for Human in The Guardian, writer Rachel Cooke points out: “There is a resonant truth at the heart of this book, and it soars above everything else, however distracting; it has to do with life, and all the loneliness it involves.” About Finck’s graphic novel, Vogue writer Julia Felsenthal said in a profile: “Drill down through its many layers, and Passing For Human seems fundamentally to be about the tension between eccentricity and assimilation, about the exhausting experience of constantly calibrating oneself against some external measure of normal (‘an exploration,’ says Finck, ‘of what it means to feel weird, rather than to be weird.’) It’s also a bildungsroman about an artist trying to understand her lifelong compulsion to make art.’’

Liana Finck is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She has had artist residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Tablet magazine. Her first book, A Bintel Brief, was published in 2014.

Benjamin Schwartz, BA, MD, Columbia University, who will introduce Liana Finck and moderate our first virtual Narrative Medicine Rounds, is an assistant professor of medicine (in surgery) at Columbia University Medical Center, where he teaches narrative medicine and visual storytelling to medical students as well as provides creative direction and strategy for patient-centered communications efforts. Dr. Schwartz is also a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker, where he sneaks his children’s names into each of his cartoons.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public. Traditionally we do not live stream these events, but you can listen to a podcast of past events on iTunes.

Photo by Jorge Colombo