Documenting Medicine

John Moses is a primary care pediatrician and a documentary photographer based at Duke University. He has been using documentary photography to explore the intersection of social and medical issues for the last fifteen years. In this talk, Dr. Moses shared his photographs of adolescent parents in North Carolina (published in the book The Youngest Parents); portraits of pioneering primary care physicians (published in Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care); and a current series of portraits of young gun crime victims. Dr. Moses teaches two courses at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies: Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography and Children and the Experience of Illness wherein children with chronic illness are paired up with student mentors and taught how to use a camera as a means of expression. He is currently producing a book that will showcase the photographs of children coping with illness. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: documentingmedicine.com/

In the United States, more than half a million babies are born prematurely each year (12.8% of all births). This is an increase of more than 36% since the 1980s. More than 70% are born between 34 and 36 weeks. 22% are born between 28 and 33 weeks; 6% are born before 28 weeks. Duke University Former Pediatric Chief Resident Dr. Alison Sweeney knew that one of the most daunting rotations for pediatric residents and medical students was the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Few came to the experience as a parent and many were intimidated by the machinery and how tiny the infants were. As a way to better understand the perspectives of parents with infants in the unit, Dr. Sweeney produced multimedia pieces about three mothers. In this talk, she shares this work and discusses how producing this project impacted her practice as a physician. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: documentingmedicine.com/

This year, about 2.5 million Americans will die. About 900,000 of them, or three in ten, will get hospice care in their last weeks or months. Hospice is specialized care for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live. It offers a way in which family, doctors, nurses, pastors, and the community can all be involved in helping a person during their last days of life. The majority of existing documentary work related to hospice focuses on the perspectives of patients and their families. In his multimedia piece, Duke University Geriatrics and Palliative Care Fellow Christopher Jones focused his project on the stories of five care-givers working in hospice and palliative care at Duke Hospice at Hock Family Pavilion. Dr. Jones presented this work in Grand Rounds at Duke. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: http://www.documentingmedicine.com/

This year, about 2.5 million Americans will die. About 900,000 of them, or three in ten, will get hospice care in their last weeks or months. Hospice is specialized care for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live. Its workers and volunteers often develop close personal relationships with their patients, exploring emotional, psychological and spiritual questions as well as medical ones. In this story, John Biewen followed one hospice patient through the last two months of her life. John Biewen directs the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies, where he teaches and produces documentary work for NPR, Public Radio International, and other audiences. His reporting and documentary work has taken him across the United States and to Europe, Japan, and India. Biewen teaches undergraduates and continuing education students in the Certificate in Documentary Studies programs at CDS. From John’s notebook, “I saw Kitty Shenay about once a week for the last two months of her life. The experience was poignant. Towards the end it was disturbing, even shocking. One day she was frail but fully present and sharp-witted, days later she'd become a near corpse, unconscious and struggling for her last breaths. And, indeed, a few hours after that I looked upon her actual corpse…It was emotional. I wiped away tears several times in Kitty's presence, and many more times while listening back to her tender moments with her daughters and with her nurse, Roland Siverson. But depressing? No. In fact, I found the experience curiously uplifting…” To hear the entire piece, or read John’s reflections on producing this piece, visit: americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/hospice/notebook.html Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: documentingmedicine.com/

In this talk, writer Sam Stephenson examines Smith’s career-long concern with caregiving, including his famous photographic essays such as “Nurse Midwife,” “Country Doctor,” “Albert Schweitzer: A Man of Mercy,” and “Minimata.” Sam Stephenson (born in 1966 in Chapel Hill) is a writer who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. Since 1997 he has been studying the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith and has authored three books on Smith’s work, including The Jazz Loft Project (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), accompanied by a traveling exhibition, a public radio series, and a website, which together won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize. Currently Stephenson is working on Chaos Manor, an experimental theater adaptation of the Jazz Loft Project, and a biography of Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund.

“Frequent fliers” are patients with more than four visits to the emergency room in one year. While this group accounts for 4 percent of patients, they account for 25 percent of ER visits. In an effort to better understand these patients, Duke University Emergency Medicine resident Andrew Parker identified five frequent fliers and documented their stories. Here are three of those stories. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: http://www.documentingmedicine.com/

For fifteen years, Radio Diaries has been giving people tape recorders and working with them to report on their own lives and histories for NPR. With this approach, Radio Diaries has helped pioneer a new form of citizen journalism and has produced some of the most acclaimed and innovative documentaries ever heard on public radio: Teenage Diaries, Prison Diaries, Diary of a Retirement Home, My So-Called Lungs, Thembi’s AIDS Diary and others. In this talk, Radio Diaries’ founder and executive producer, Joe Richman, will share clips from stories he’s produced with people whose health conditions shape their daily lives. Joe Richman is an award-winning independent producer and reporter for NPR’s All Things Considered and the founder of Radio Diaries, a non-profit organization. The Los Angeles Times has called Richman “A kind of Studs Terkel of the airwaves.” Over the past 15 years, Radio Diaries has helped to pioneer a model of working with people to document their own lives for public radio. Richman worked for many years as a producer on NPR programs All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Car Talk and Heat. He also teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and lives in New York City. Presented in partnership with the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at Duke, this talk is the third in a series of presentations by documentarians who have produced work that effectively renders medical experiences. The series is part of the Documenting Medicine Program, a collaboration between the Duke Graduate Medical Education Program and the Center for Documentary Studies. For more information, visit: http://www.documentingmedicine.com/

Half of high school students currently use addictive substances. One in eight high school students have a diagnosable clinical substance use disorder involving nicotine, alcohol or other drugs. Only six to eight percent of the total number of patients in need of treatment receive care. Adolescent and Child Psychiatry Chief Resident Jennifer Segura found herself drawn to working with this population, but wanted to better understand the demands and rewards from the perspectives of clinicians and patients before committing to this field. As a way to do so, Dr. Segura decided to focus her documentary project on the stories of six individuals: four care-givers working in Duke’s Adolescent Intensive Outpatient Program (AIOP) and one mother and son, who received services there. Featured here is an excerpt of clinician Elise Alexander’s story. To view all the stories, visit Dr. Segura’s website: http://aiopduke.wordpress.com/. In this talk, Dr. Jennifer Segura shares this work in Grand Rounds. Duke University Former Pediatric Chief Resident Dr. Alison Sweeney knew that one of the most daunting rotations for pediatric residents and medical students was the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Few came to the experience as a parent and many were intimidated by the machinery and how tiny the infants were. As a way to better understand the perspectives of parents with infants in the unit, Dr. Sweeney produced multimedia pieces about three mothers. In this talk, she shares this work and discusses how producing this project impacted her practice as a physician. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: documentingmedicine.com/

In this talk photographer Harris will show his photographs taken at the Samaritan House Clinic in San Mateo California and discuss how his work as a documentary photographer in the field resonates with the work of physicians in the clinic. Pediatrician/photographer and former student, John Moses, introduces Harris. Alex Harris is a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) and of DoubleTake Magazine. He has taught documentary photography and writing at Duke since 1975. He helped to launch the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program at Duke and is currently teaching documentary writing and photography fieldwork seminars through CDS and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Among his books are River of Traps, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in 1991, and The Idea of Cuba (2007). His photographs are in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: http://www.documentingmedicine.com/

John Moses is a primary care pediatrician and a documentary photographer based at Duke University. He has been using documentary photography to explore the intersection of social and medical issues for the last fifteen years. In this talk, Dr. Moses shared his photographs of adolescent parents in North Carolina (published in the book The Youngest Parents); portraits of pioneering primary care physicians (published in Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care); and a current series of portraits of young gun crime victims. Dr. Moses teaches two courses at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies: Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography and Children and the Experience of Illness wherein children with chronic illness are paired up with student mentors and taught how to use a camera as a means of expression. He is currently producing a book that will showcase the photographs of children coping with illness. Documenting Medicine is a program at Duke University which provides Duke physician residents and fellows with the tools and training to use documentary as a way to get to know and better understand patients and their families, as well as care-givers. This program is a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Graduate Medical Education Department at Duke. Pilot funding has been provided by the Chancellor's Innovation Fund. For more information about the program, visit: documentingmedicine.com/