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GCSC Keynote Lecture: The Ethicality of Storytelling: Privacy, Confidentiality, and "Ownership" of Patients' Stories with Prof Rita Charon (Columbia University)

When

Jul 21, 2026 from 04:00 to 06:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

MFR, online

Contact Name

Contact Phone

+49 641 / 99-30 013

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Organisiert im Kontext des internationalen Workshops Applied Ethical Narratology im Rahmen des Jubiläumsjahres

 

Abstract 

Creative, cognitive, and psychological currents in private and public lives have been overtaken by stories. Astute, grandiose, or tawdry, storytelling has reinvented our daily lives. Persons seeking health care recount their experiences of illness to clinicians in what are supposed to be confidential interchanges. Some clinicians listen only for diagnostic clues of disease. Others are moved by the stories they hear from patients, either because they have been well trained to attend to their patient’s experiences or because they recognize a story worth publishing themselves. 

Clinicians may consider publishing patients’ stories as a professional duty to illuminate suffering and advocate for better care. Some aim to become writers. Others are feeding their cv. Some but not all clinician-writers seek and obtain consent from patients to write about them. Some but not all journals require written consent from patients to publish these stories. Clinicians have been sued for libel for publishing about patients without consent.

 The keynote lecture will examine confounding and competing interests surrounding patients’ privacy, exposing fundamental schisms between clinician and patient perspectives. Deep questions surface about professional power, the duty to do no harm, and the very nature of story as a pluripotent apeirogon. 

 

//Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar and one of the founders of the field of narrative medicine. She is the Bernard Schoenberg Professor of Social Medicine, the founding chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, and Professor of Medicine and of Medical Humanities and Ethics at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. She is the Executive Director of Columbia Narrative Medicine. She completed the MD at Harvard and the PhD in English at Columbia. Her research investigates narrative medicine theory and training, reflective practice, health care justice, and health care team effectiveness and has been supported by the NIH, the NEH, and many private foundations. She was honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as a Jefferson Lecturer, the highest academic distinction awarded by the NEH. She lectures extensively nationally and internationally and has authored, co-authored, or co-edited four books on narrative medicine and publishes in leading medical and literary journals.