To The Lighthouse

Available for over a year

Part of the BBC's NHS at 70 season of special programmes This programme deals with serious medical issues and trauma. On the basis that "fiction reveals truth that reality obscures", in 2000 Dr Rita Charon founded the pioneering Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, which started to teach literature and creative writing to medical students. "Narrative Medicine" was the term she coined to describe the capacity to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness. Simply - it's medicine practised by someone who knows what to do with stories. This idea has been taken up by medical schools all over the world, including Britain, as a way to help health professionals grow in empathy and reflection. Narrative medicine draws patients, doctors, nurses, and therapists together to re-imagine a health care based on trust and trustworthiness, humility, and mutual recognition. And for Rita, actively looking to understand what a patient is telling you, in the way you might closely read a work of literature, is the way in. Dr Charon takes a different book each day as a starting point for her own very personal reflections on her experiences with the people she treats. These books become doorways into a different reality, and shed light on the different outcomes of illness - acceptance, death, healing. Each programme is a meditation on our changing minds and bodies and the passing of time. In this episode Rita's starting point is Virginia Woolf's novel "To The Lighthouse", finding parallels between the portents of war in the novel and the responses of her New York City patients to the September 11th attacks.