Julie Swaney, M. Div. Edu Julie Swaney, M. Div. Reverend Swaney graduated from Duke University, and completed her Masters of Divinity at Yale University. She is the director of the pastoral care internship program at University Hospital. She is on the faculty of the Depts. of Medicine and Psychiatry, and is an active teacher in the Program in Health Care Ethics, Humanities and Law.
All illness involves both objective and subjective elements.
Traditional medical education often focuses on the objective elements of illness that we call disease. The illness, which is the experience of being sick, is often poorly appreciated. The voice and the experience of the patient is often inadvertently made silent at worse, and diminished at best, in modern medical practice. This course is a four-week elective bringing together senior medical students and pastoral graduate students to examine the nature of illness from the patient's perspective. For example, if the student is planning a residency in pediatrics and wishes to follow a child with cancer and that child's family, then we ask that the student select a second patient mentor who will present very different challenges.