Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq will with Danielle about Why Doctors Write, alongside the encounter between arts and medicine, and the doctor-patient connection.

Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is one of the foremost voices in the medical world today, shining an unflinching light on the realities of healthcare and speaking passionately about the doctor patient relationship.

She writes about medicine and the doctor-patient connection. Her writing appears in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic, as well as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Danielle Ofri is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bellevue Literary Review, the first literary journal to arise from a medical setting, now an award-winning, independent nonprofit literary arts organization. She is a primary care internist at Bellevue Hospital and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU.

Her lectures to medical and general audiences are renowned for her use of dramatic stories (and avoidance of PowerPoint). Her essays have been selected for Best American Essays (twice) and Best American Science Writing, by Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, and Susan Orlean.

Ofri is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2023 Davies Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, the 2022 National Humanism in Medicine Medal from the Gold Foundation, the 2020 Global Listening Legend Award, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Ofri is a “Master” of the American College of Physicians, and has received the McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.”

Danielle Ofri has given TED talks on Deconstructing Perfection and Fear: A Necessary Emotion, and has also performed stories for the Moth. She is featured in the documentaries Why Doctors Write and White Coat Rebels.

An ever-struggling student of the cello, she’s hoping to someday complete the ever-uphill slog through all 36 movements of the Bach cello suites.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Cathy, Jason and Phil about Personalised and public health: learning (and not learning) from the past. Our guests share a research interest around public health, personalised health, the politics of health, but have different disciplinary training. During the conversation, we tease out some of the similarities but also differences between past and present, and a humanities versus biomedical approach. We explore what can we learn from each other across disciplinary approaches, and from the past to inform approaches to population health today.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research ranges from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, and moves between poetry, prose, and drama. It also includes less obviously “literary” forms of writing, such as medical or educational works. That range is exemplified by the monograph on dialogue that she is currently completing for Oxford University Press.

Jason Gill is Professor of Cardiometabolic Health at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the role of lifestyle-related factors (principally physical activity, diet and sleep) in the prevention and management of cardiometabolic diseases, and on ethnicity and health. This work encompasses epidemiology; biological mechanisms underpinning cardiometabolic disease risk; and development of realistic and sustainable lifestyle interventions. He also established the MSc in Sport and Exercise Science & Medicine at the University of Glasgow, has contributed to national clinical and physical activity guidelines, is an editor at several journals, and plays an active role in public engagement and communication of science.

Phil Withington is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. A specialist in early modern history (1500-1800), he has a long-term interest in medical humanities in general and the history of intoxicants and addiction in particular. He is currently writing a book on England’s first psychoactive revolution and running a project on craft alcohol and urban environments.

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Martina about appliedness and medical education, medical humanities and (the lack of) defined disciplinary identity, and how the medical humanities interact with multiple academic disciplines in research and teaching.

Martina King studied medicine, German literature and philosophy in Munich and qualified as paediatrician. After 15 years of clinical paediatrics and some years of teaching modern German literature, she turned to medical humanities: she lectured medical history in Glasgow and Bern, wrote her second book on the cultural and literary history of German bacteriology and became professor of medical humanities at Fribourg University in 2018. Her current research interests are medical spaces in modern literature and culture, and the medical discharge report as factual narrative genre.