Jack Coulehan, MD, MPH

Professor
Department of Preventive Medicine
Director Emeritus
Division of Medicine in Society
         
Literature and Medicine
Empathy
Narrative
Clinical Ethics

e-mail: john.coulehan@stonybrook.edu

Jack Coulehan is Emeritus Professor of Preventive Medicine and Senior Fellow of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. He graduated from St. Vincent College (BA) and the University of Pittsburgh (MD, MPH); completed residencies in internal medicine and public health at the University of Pennsylvania, Wake Forest University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Until his retirement in 2007, Jack directed the ethics and humanities program at Stony Brook medical school and chaired the ethics case consultation service at University Hospital. He is the author of over 200 articles and book chapters in the medical literature, ranging in topic from clinical trials of depression treatment in primary care and studies of heart disease among Navajo Indians to essays on medical humanities, professionalism, and the physician-patient relationship. Jack’s poems and stories have appeared in major literary magazines and medical journals in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia; and his work is widely anthologized. His collections of poetry include The Knitted Glove (1991), First Photographs of Heaven (1994), The Heavenly Ladder (2001), and Medicine Stone (2002). He is the author or editor of several other books, most recently The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills for Clinical Practice (5th edition, 2006) and Primary Care: More Poems of Physicians (2006). Among Jack’s honors are the Distinguished Service Award, U.S. Public Health Service; NEH Fellowship in Medical Humanities; Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Award for Poetry; Aesculapius Award for Excellence in Teaching; American Nurses’ Association Award for Best Book, 2001; Merck Fellowship at Yaddo; American College of Physicians Award for Poetry; and the Humanities Award of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, 2006.

Essays and Scholarly Reports
Coulehan J. Written Role Models in Medical Education, Medical Humanities. 2007; 33: 106-109.
Coulehan J. Dr. William Osler Remembers His Patient Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman Quarterly, 2007.
Shapiro J, Coulehan J, Wear D, Montello M. Medical Humanities and their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and their Implications. Academic Medicine, in press.

Book Chapters
Coulehan J. Dying with Dignity: The Story Reveals Its Meaning, in Malpais J, Lickiss N (Eds.) Perspectives on Human Dignity. Dordrecht, Springer, 2007, pp. 209-223.
Coulehan J. Foreword for Bertman S. One Breath Apart. Facing Dissection. Cambridge, Digital Interactive Systems, 2007.
Coulehan J. Imagining the House of God, in Conley C, Kohn M (Eds.) Return to the House of God, Kent State University Press, 2008.
Coulehan J. In the Middle of Life’s Journey, in Berlin R. (Ed.) Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 92-104.
Coulehan J. Compassionate Solidarity: Suffering and Medicine, in Malpais J, Lickiss N (Eds.) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Dordrecht, Springer, forthcoming 2008. 

Book Reviews
Coulehan J. Review of  In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet. Medical Ethics (Lahey Clinic), 2008; 15: 5-6.
Coulehan J. Review of How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, The Pharos. 2008; 71, Spring: 39-40.

Poetry
“Anatomy Lesson,” “Hands,” “Lachrymae Rerun,” and “Phrenology,” reprinted in Pitt Medicine, 2007/8, Winter, pp. 25-27.
“Levitation,” Poetry East, 2007, #60, p. 99
“Sewage Treatment,” JAMA, 2007; 297: 1166
“A Theory of Labor,” JAMA, 2007; 297: 1411
“To the Man with the Video Camera at the Monastery on Patmos,” Comstock Review, 2007

Invited Lectures and Presentations

Visiting Professor, Writing the Medical Experience, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY (June 2006, 2007, 2008)

“Compassionate Solidarity: Suffering, Poetry, and Medicine,” Colloquium on Human Suffering and Disability, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (January 2007)

“The Ethics of Stem Cell Research,” Granite State Study Club, Dover, New Hampshire (April 2007)

Medical Grand Rounds, “Physician Assisted Suicide,” Beth Israel Hospital, New York City (October 2007)

Visiting Professor of Medical Humanities, Des Moines University College of Medicine, Des Moines, Iowa (October 2007)

“Compassion and Connection in Palliative Care,” Metropolitan Jewish Hospital, Brooklyn, NY (April 2008)

“Teaching the Medical Humanities,” Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York (April 2008)
“Poetry, Metaphor, and Healing,” Yale Symposium on the Medical Humanities, Yale University (April 2008)

“Teaching Professionalism Through Creative Literature,” Annual Meeting, Medical Librarians of New York and New Jersey, New York University (November 2008)