Annual Forum on Medical Humanities Education & Teacher Appreciation Dinner
Said and Unsaid: Poetry and Medicine
Date: 15 May 2026 (Friday)
Time: 5:30 – 9:00 pm
Venue: 1887, 7/F, LKS Faculty of Medicine, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam
Abstract:
How do the tools of reading and writing poetry help us as human beings, as health professionals and as health communicators? Poetry, which can seem arcane, is part of the rhythms of our bodies and how our minds process experience. By exploring metaphor, cadence, ambiguity, arc, and other characteristics of poetry, we can better understand the complexities of health, illness, and caregiving. With a particular focus on the practice of anesthesiology, we examine the importance of poetic tropes in human communication and clinical care.
Speaker:
Prof Audrey Shafer
Professor Emerita of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine
Biosketch:
Audrey Shafer, MD is Professor Emeritum of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine / Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System; founder, Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; founder, Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration; co-founder of Pegasus Physician Writers, and co-founder of the Stanford undergraduate minor in Medical Humanities. She is the author of The Mailbox, a children’s novel on posttraumatic stress disorder in veterans. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies.
The objective of the Annual Forum on Medical Humanities Education is to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration among stakeholders, including healthcare professionals, academics, patients and students, to achieve the mission of the HKUMed Medical Humanities programme:
To help nurture the development of medical students into caring physicians who are capable of a deeper understanding of the human condition and thus provide better care to the patients as well as to themselves.
The Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit is immensely grateful for the generous donation from an anonymous donor in appreciation of the exceptional teachers in the MBBS Medical Humanities (MH) programme, and who wished to specifically recognize our Director, Professor Julie Chen for her leadership and longstanding contributions to medical humanities education.
Photos for review
