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Author Series: The Soul of Care In-Person
Join Countway Library and HMS Center for Bioethics for an author talk with Arthur Kleinman, MD about his book, The Soul of Care
- Books will be sold (by Porter Square Books) and signed at event!
- Registration required
About the Book
In The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman delivers a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and his marriage to Joan, and he describes the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caretaking. He also writes about the problems our society faces as medical technology advances and the cost of health care soars but caring for patients no longer seems important. Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work--at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonizing, but it is always rich in meaning. In the face of our current political indifference and the challenge to the health care system, he emphasizes how we must ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves, and of our doctors. To give care, to be "present" for someone who needs us, and to feel and show kindness are deep emotional and moral experiences, enactments of our core values. The practice of caregiving teaches us what is most important in life, and reveals the very heart of what it is to be human.
About the Author
Arthur Kleinman, MD is Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Kleinman is a leading figure in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and medical humanities. His books include What Really Matters; Rethinking Psychiatry; The Illness Narratives; and The Soul of Care. He is the editor of an issue of Daedalus on Mental Health and also edited the first World Mental Health Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Amongst his awards is the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Tanner Lectures, and an Honorary Doctorate from York University in Canada. Kleinman is in his 49th year at Harvard where he has supervised over 100 PhD and MD PhD students, 50 MA students, 250 postdoctoral fellows, and taught thousands of undergraduate and medical students. His contributions to ethics in health and medicine, besides the Tanner Lectures and his book What Really Matters, include a coedited Daedalus volume Beyond Bioethics, his collection of essays Writing at The Margin and the coedited Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities.