[Cancelled] Center for Medical Humanities Distinguished Lecture with Dr. Johanna Shapiro

In an abundance of caution and to ensure social distancing during the COVID-19 outbreak, this event has been cancelled.


Stories of Sickness: Listening Narratively to Co-Construct New Understandings about Illness”
Serious illness is a major biographical disruption. Our lives are going along one way, we have plans, aspirations, dreams; and then suddenly illness intervenes, and our lives veer off in a completely different, and usually worse, direction.  The story that we knew has become broken.
Illness pushes us all toward disintegration and dissolution. It is our stories that can hold us together and bring us back to our lives.  If we’re lucky, confronted by illness we learn to make new stories on our own. But when we are able to share our stories with physicians who know how to receive them and really hear them, we have a better chance of co-constructing better, more satisfying, and more meaningful stories.



Johanna Shapiro earned her B.A., MA (counseling psychology), and PhD (counseling/women’s studies) from Stanford University. She is professor of family medicine and founder and director of the Program in Medical Humanities & Arts, University of California Irvine, School of Medicine (http://www.meded.uci.edu/student-life/medical-humanities.asp). She is the recipient of many teaching awards and an elected member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society.

As a psychologist and medical educator, Dr. Shapiro has focused her research and scholarship on the socialization process of medical education, with a special focus on the impact of training on student empathy; professional identity formation; and the medical student-patient relationship. She routinely uses reflective writing in medical student and resident teaching and has also presented workshops on reflective writing to family physicians, cancer survivors, and primary care patients. Dr. Shapiro has served as poetry co-editor for the e-magazine Pulse and the journal Families, Systems, and Health; and as an assistant editor for Family Medicine. She is widely published in the field of medical humanities, and has over 160 peer-reviewed publications. Her book, The Inner World of Medical Students: Listening to Their Voices in Poetry, is a critical analysis of important themes in the socialization process of medical students as expressed through their creative writing.

In her spare time, Dr. Shapiro enjoys spending time with her 6 grandchildren, playing folk guitar, writing poetry, and taking walks on the beach.