Distinguished Lecture Series 26-27: Workshop by Dr. Michael Stanley

Workshop: Prescriptions, Poetry, and Prose: Narration and Knowledge on Medical Topics in Literature

Speaker: Michael Stanley, Division Director of Neurocognitive Disorders, Tufts Medical Center; Associate Professor, Tufts University

4:00PM October 21, 2026 (Wed)

Abstract

What does literature know about medicine? Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded his students that the god of medicine is also the god of song. Indeed, verse long served physicians as mnemonic, and the case history is itself a kind of story. But what happens to that story when the doctor's note becomes a 'document'? What might Chekhov's doctor confined to his own Ward No. 6, Hemingway's convalescents in another country, Auden on the art of healing, or Johnson mourning Dr Levet tell us that the chart cannot? Is literature a form of clinical knowledge, or only its consolation? And who narrates – the doctor, the patient, or the institution between them? Perhaps we should consider instead the clinician as witness – if so, what kind of reading might witness require? This workshop takes up these questions through poems and short stories of doctoring and patienting, treating narration not as ornament to medicine but as a way of knowing.

Biography

Michael Stanley is Division Director of Neurocognitive Disorders at Tufts Medical Center and an Associate Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Tufts University School of Medicine Maine Track Program, Mass General Brigham's neurology residency program, and Brigham & Women's Hospital's Behavioral Neurology/ Neuropsychiatry Fellowship. In addition to his administrative and clinical duties, he serves on a number of national boards and committees including the American Academy of Neurology's Brain Health Committee. He is a recognized fieldbuilder in the neurohumanities and in nearly every division of its manifold activities he has contributed lectures, workshops, essays, or support.

This is an in-person only event. We welcome you to sign up.

If quota via Enventbrite is full, please sign up through the link below.

https://english.hku.hk/event/615/Dr._Michael_Stanley_-_Public_Lecture_&_Workshop