International Health Humanities Network Membership

Dr Sara Watkin Biography

Sara is fascinated by the effect of cultural influences and illness narratives on health behavior, and the use of the creative arts to achieve shifts in perception. She is an Honorary Physician to the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine.

She completed her post-graduate training at The London School of Contemporary Dance, trained in Psychiatry and General Practice in Glasgow and London (whilst the Osteopath for Cirque du Soleil and London Studio Centre), and returned to Scotland in 2006. Whilst a GP in Irvine Welsh’s home territory Sara questioned traditional medical assumptions regarding how early childhood experiences shape one’s mind, personality, relationships, and nervous system throughout life. She was appointed as Medical Adviser to Scottish Adoption and Barnardo's Scotland, and joined the Board of Directors at North Edinburgh Arts.

Sara developed her interest and expertise in chronic pain, with support from Lorimer Moseley and David Butler ("Explain Pain"). She uses narrative, metaphor and imagery to help people process trauma, understand their pain, and develop healthy relationships and resilience.

Sara believes that the new computerized GP language of payment-linked boxes is a barrier to therapeutic relationship exchanges. She is committed to a bio-psychosocial model, effective multidisciplinary team working, and creative, culturally sensitive assets-based approaches to community health.

Sara was the GP for the women in HMP Edinburgh, remains on the SWGWO and CPG Families Affected by Imprisonment, and spends the rest of her clinic time as an independent GP and Osteopath.

Kristin is the Administrator for the Holland Regenerative Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and a PhD student in the history of medicine and public health, with special interest in infectious diseases. She believes that the use of role-playing and popular culture can help make public health preparedness both more accessable, and more fun. She has been acting since the age of eight, has been in over 100 different productions, both musicals and dramas, and has acted professionally in theatre, film and video. Prior to pursuing her career in health, Kristin worked in design and administration of theatre for 15 years. Additionally, she completed her undergraduate internship at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Kristin holds a BA in theater from the Colorado College and a Master's in Business Administration emphasizing international business from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is anticipated to complete her PhD from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in December of 2015.

Sunnie S. We, MPS

Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine

Rudin Fellowship in Medical Ethics and Humanities

Office of Student Affairs

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

D. Wedding 

Kym Weed is a Teaching Assistnat Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, she is the Co-Director of the HHIVE Lab, a health humanities research lab, and the Associate Director of the English MA program concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture. As a scholar of American literature and health humanities, she researches the intersections of literature and science as well as narratives that shape experiences of illness, health, disability, and embodiment. Her book manuscript, “Our Microbes: Imagining Human Interdependence with Bacteria in American Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1930,” extends scholarship about the anxieties provoked by disease-causing germs to attend to the bacteriologists and fiction writers who located possibility in the microbial world. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in health humanities, disability studies, American literature, and writing. 

Caroline Wellbery, M.D., Ph.D. has been involved in all aspects of teaching in the Department of Family Medicine, both at the medical student and residency level, since 1994. Her long-standing interest in medical humanities goes back to her graduate student days, when she received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her humanities work is represented in the website Interacting with the Medical Humanities. Other current interests include inter-institutional medical humanities research, using the arts to communicate about climate change and communicating through the arts with vulnerable groups as a mechanism for social change. She also runs Hippocrates Café, a monthly music and literature performance, for and by medical students. She is celebrating the second successful year of the Creative Arts and Humanism fellowship she founded.

Rosie Wellesley studied both Fine art and Medicine as an undergraduate at Oxford University in the days when university education was free, and since then she has continued to develop her art and medical careers in parallel.

After leaving Oxford she taught life-drawing for three years at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art whilst studying clinical medicine. During this time she also drew several large scale murals including at the History of Art Department in Oxford and at UCL medical school. As a junior doctor, she continued her art practice before moving to work in Zambia.  She returned to complete her specialist medical training in Tower Hamlets whilst simultaneously doing the postgraduate ‘Drawing Year’ at the Royal Drawing School in 2010. Since then, she has worked as a children’s author-illustrator with Pavilion Childrens Publishers whilst working part time as a GP. Her sixth picture-book received a Welcome Trust ‘People Award’, was developed with the help of her patients at the Bromley By Bow Partnership, and is (probably) the first dinosaur-themed book to win a BMA award.

She continues her illustration and painting practice whilst now working as a GP in rural Herefordshire. 

www.rosiewellesley.com

Hi, I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and French at Cornell University and am working on melancholy in the renaissance period (literary texts and other sources), trying to relate early modern melancholy to views on depression and mental health today and see the contributions that literature and pre-modern conceptions have to make on our contemporary understandings. My work falls outside traditional literary studies for this reason, and I've been curious about Health Humanities and Public Humanities for quite sometime as a better 'home' for my studies and interests. 

I'd love to connect with other people and instuties working in this important intersection. 

Thank you! 

Yael 

Historian of health in 20th century Britain and Ireland, particularly relating to mental health, law, sexuality and gender