"You Have Made Your People Hear Hard Things:" Jazz and Medicine as Moral Practice

In W.H. Auden's poem "The Art of Healing," he writes that "every sickness is a musical problem and every cure a musical solution." Jazz and health care are two things we normally don't think about together, let alone in the context of mental health.

Theological ethicist Patrick Smith joins physician and writer Brewer Eberly to explore jazz and medicine as moral practice. How does jazz draw out metaphors that help us think about health care and clinical relationships differently? How does jazz teach us to lament and work with uncertainty? As we consider the hard things we have been made to see and hear in health care, how might jazz-a form of art born of oppression and pain-disrupt complacency and awaken us to new ways to live and to heal and to sing?

Patrick Smith, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor of Theological Ethics and Bioethics; Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Brewer Eberly, MD, MACS, McDonald Agape Fellow in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School

This event is free and open to the public. Registration required.