Jonathan McFarland, President of Doctor as Humanist, and I recently had the honor of presenting at the University of Washington Nature & Health conference on Thursday, October 14th, 2021. Our overall talk was Nature, Medical Humanities, and Medical Activism. Jonathan presented on Nature & Medical Humanities and I presented on Nature & Medical Activism. Here is the powerpoint from my talk.
Thanks so much to Josh Lawler, Star Berry, and the whole conference team from the University of Washington Nature & Health program. It all ran very smoothly and professionally and brought together great speakers from around the globe. There is a groundswell of interest in looking at the bi-directional effects of Nature & Health – we, at Doctor as Humanist, are planning a free, virtual symposium next month. Register for free for our Nature & Medicine: Restoring the Balance Between Earth & Health – we hope to see you next month!
We’ve got a great line up of speakers and round table panelists, including Bob Lawrence, one of the founders of Physicians for Human Rights and Center for a Livable Future Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the founding director of the Center for a Livable Future; Rachel Corby, author of ReWild Yourself: Becoming Nature; Julia Corbett, author of Out of the Woods: Seeing the Nature in the Everyday; Lewis Mehl-Madrona, author of Coyote Medicine and Narrative Medicine; Qing Li, author of Forest Bathing: How Trees can Help You Find Health & Happiness, amongst many others. Link to the program.
One of the projects we are doing as part of the symposium is the Tree of Medicine – a photomosaic on the Mosaically site. You can post on Instagram or Twitter with the hash tags: #NatureMed2021 and #DoctorHumanist and we’ll upload your photos into the Tree of Medicine. You can write a few words of why this photo is important to you and how it relates to Nature & Medicine. Here are a few of the photos I’ve posted.
An unexpected beautiful scene on a walk through Seattle – reminding me that Nature is here, now.
The face on this tree on San Juan Island’s Lime Kiln State Park reminds me of the sentience of nature.
Cannon Beach, Oregon, a breath-taking & invigorating view.
The idea behind this conference is to highlight the many benefits of nature & health while also expanding our idea of being a medical professional to including the health of the Earth. We are in a symbiotic relationship with Nature and cannot exist apart from Nature. In fact, we ourselves are nature, we are made up of nature, our backyards are nature. I’ll be giving a workshop on Saturday 11/13/21 with a focus on Nature is Here, Now. The care of Nature begins with the care of ourselves, the nature of our homes, the nature of our backyard, and breaks down the artificial separations of humans/nature and city/nature. I’ll be joined by a couple of great psychiatry residents I’ve been working with, Eunice Stallman, MD (who has been doing an elective on Narrative Medicine) and Lewis Kerwin, MD (who has been doing an elective on Nature, Health, and Design). We’ll be joined by my friend, photographer and author, John Riggs, author of Clear Cut – The Wages of Dominion. I wrote a review of his book on 5/8/20.
Each of us on the planning committee recorded a short video on the Tree of Medicine project and the Nature & Medicine: Restoring the Balance Between Earth & Health, here’s the link to my video.
Being Fully Human 