Searching for Medicine’s Soul

A Medical Missionary in the Nuba Mountains with Dr. Tom Catena

Dr. Tom Catena joins Aaron to discuss his experience as a physician in the Nuba Mountains in the Sudan.
Dr. Catena attended Brown University where he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but felt called to missionary work. He attended the Duke University School of Medicine on a U.S. Navy scholarship. After graduating, he completed his Navy commitment and later began missionary work in Africa. He volunteered at St. Mary’s Hospital in Nairobi for six years before helping establish the Mother of Mercy Hospital, where he currently works day and night to help heal the sick and the wounded victims of jihadist war. Dr. Catena typically treats up to 400 patients in a day and is on call 24/7.
Learn more about Dr. Catena and the Sudan Relief Fund on their website.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Samuel Shem, part 2

Samuel Shem joins Aaron to continue their conversation about The House of God, and its recent sequel, Man's 4th Best Hospital.
Samuel Shem, Professor of Medicine in Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School, is a novelist, playwright, and activist. His first novel, The House of God, was called “one of the two most important American medical novels of the 20th century” by The Lancet and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as #2 on its list of “The 10 Best Satires of All Time” (#1 Don Quixote, #3 Catch-22).
Graduating from Harvard and Harvard Medical School, Shem was a Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil in Physiology at Oxford and on the Harvard Medical faculty for decades. Honored as a Visiting Artist/Scholar at The American Academy in Rome, he is an in-demand speaker around the world and has given over sixty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine.”
Learn more about Sam and his work at his website.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

The Grieving Brain with Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor

Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor joins Aaron to discuss her book, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss.
Mary-Frances O'Connor is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab in investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body. O’Connor earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a fellowship at UCLA. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science, and featured in Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Learn more about her book, A Grieving Brain.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

African Mission Healthcare with Dr. Jon Fielder

Dr. Jon Fielder joins Aaron to discuss his medical mission work in Africa.
Dr. Fielder has served as a medical missionary to Africa for almost 20 years. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Chemistry from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, in 1999, he earned his Doctor of Medical degree (MD) from The John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, in 2002.
Dr. Fielder was a physician at AIC Kijabe Hospital in Kenya from 2002 to 2006, overseeing a US government-funded HIV program for nearly 2,000 patients. He served as a consultant physician at the Partners in Hope Medical Center in Lilongwe, Malawi, from 2009 to 2014. His handbook, Tuberculosis in the Era of HIV, has been used widely in several African countries.
In 2010, Dr. Fielder co-founded African Mission Healthcare (AMH) with the investor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Mark Gerson, a college friend, to support the work of mission hospitals across Africa. Dr. Fielder serves as chief executive of AMH, which since its inception has provided financial support totaling more than $26 million and expertise to more than 40 hospital partners in 18 African countries.
Learn more about Dr. Fielder and African Mission Healthcare.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Samuel Shem

Samuel Shem joins Aaron to discuss his book, The House of God, and its recent sequel, Man's 4th Best Hospital.
Samuel Shem, Professor of Medicine in Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School, is a novelist, playwright, and activist. His first novel, The House of God, was called “one of the two most important American medical novels of the 20th century” by The Lancet and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as #2 on its list of “The 10 Best Satires of All Time” (#1 Don Quixote, #3 Catch-22).
Graduating from Harvard and Harvard Medical School, Shem was a Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil in Physiology at Oxford and on the Harvard Medical faculty for decades. Honored as a Visiting Artist/Scholar at The American Academy in Rome, he is an in-demand speaker around the world and has given over sixty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine.”
Learn more about Sam and his work at his website.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

The Other Victims of Covid-19 with Dr. Christine Hancock

Dr. Christine Hancock joins Aaron to discuss how she became interested in medicine and her experience serving an underserved population during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Hancock is a medical director and family physician at Sea Mar Community Health Centers in Bellingham, Washington, and the clinical director for Sea Mar's opioid initiatives. She is an alumna of the UC Berkley UC San Francisco joint medical program and she completed her residency in Family Medicine at the Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. Dr. Hancock's research and teaching focus on rural and community health with an emphasis on chronic pain and opioid use disorders.
The Pandemic Didn’t Unfold How Dr. Christine Hancock Expected
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Brain Death and Its Controversies with Dr. Ariane Lewis

Dr. Ariane Lewis joins Aaron to discuss the concept of death by neurologic criteria.
Dr. Lewis is a professor in the departments of neurology and neurosurgery and the director of NYU Langone’s Division of Neurocritical Care. As an expert on end of life social ethical and legal controversies related to death by neurologic criteria, she served on the steering committee for the World Brain Death Project, is an observer on the Determination of Death Act Drafting Committee, and is the international advisor to the Canadian Critical Care Society Definition and Determination of Death Committee. She is also chair of the NYU Langone Medical Center Ethics Committee, the past chair of the Neurocritical Care Society Ethics Committee, and a member of the American Academy Neurology, Ethics, Law, and Humanities Committee. Dr. Lewis has over a hundred publications and is a deputy editor of the Disputes and Debates section of the Neurology Publication and Seminars in Neurology. She's also a fellow in the Neurocritical Care Society.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

The Art of Dying with Dr. Lydia Dugdale

Dr. Lydia Dugdale joins Aaron to discuss her book—The Lost Art of Dying—and the place of death and dying in our culture.
Dr. Lydia Dugdale, MD is a New York City internal medicine primary care doctor and medical ethicist. She is Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University. Prior to her 2019 move to Columbia, she was the Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine. In addition to her book, she edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century, a volume that articulates a bioethical framework for a contemporary art of dying.
The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Covid-19 and Science with Ari Schulman

Ari Schulman, editor of The New Atlantis, joins Aaron to discuss our mishandling of the pandemic, the faults of the CDC, and our misconceptions about science and scientific authority.
Ari Schulman is editor of The New Atlantis, as well as editor of TheNewAtlantis.com and of the New Atlantis Books series.
His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, Commentary, First Things, and Slate. He has previously been a research assistant in the Opinion department at The New York Times, an ontological engineer at Cycorp, and has degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Psychiatric Misadventures with Dr. Paul McHugh

Dr. Paul McHugh joins Aaron to discuss the purpose of psychiatry and psychiatric overreach in medicine.
Dr. Paul R. McHugh is University Distinguished Service Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he served as Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001.
In a distinguished career that began with his training at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Dr. McHugh has taught at Cornell, the University of Oregon, and since 1975 at Johns Hopkins. He was the co-creator of the Mini Mental States Examination, one of the most widely used tests of cognitive function, and he sponsored the work that resulted in The 36-Hour Day, a bestselling guide for families and caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s and other dementia conditions.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. McHugh and Dr. Phillip R. Slavney published The Perspectives of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Polarities, which may be said to have embodied the tenets of the influential “Hopkins School” of the discipline. For the wider public, Dr. McHugh has published on psychiatry — both its findings and its failings — in The American Scholar, First Things, Commentary, Public Discourse, the Weekly Standard, and The New Atlantis. His books for general readers are The Mind Has Mountains (2006), a collection of his essays, and Try to Remember (2008), which concerns his role in debunking the “recovered memory” fad in psychotherapy. In 2015, the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing was established in the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.