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In W.H. Auden’s poem “The Art of Healing,” he writes that “every sickness is a musical problem and every cure a musical solution.” Jazz and health care are two things we normally don’t think about together, let alone in the context of mental health.
Theological ethicist Patrick Smith joins physician and writer Brewer Eberly to explore jazz and medicine as moral practice. How does jazz draw out metaphors that help us think about health care and clinical relationships differently? How does jazz teach us to lament and work with uncertainty? As we consider the hard things we have been made to see and hear in health care, how might jazz—a form of art born of oppression and pain—disrupt complacency and awaken us to new ways to live and to heal and to sing?
Patrick Smith, Ph.D.
Associate Research Professor of Theological Ethics and Bioethics; Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
Patrick T. Smith is the director of bioethics programs for the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. He is an associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics at Duke University Divinity School and associate professor in population health sciences, Duke University Medical School.
Smith is a senior fellow with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke. He was recently elected as president-elect for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities. He also is a fellow with the Hastings Center. He has experience in clinical ethics previously serving as a Director of Ethics at Angela Hospice Care Center in Michigan and as an Ethics Associate with Boston Children's Hospital. His current research and writing are in the areas of moral philosophy, religious bioethics, and the intersection of the arts and the promotion of health justice and equitable health care.
Smith is especially committed to exploring the close and often forgotten links between bioethics, public health, community engagement, and social justice. He has served on the board of directors of organizations working for more equitable social arrangements such as YW Boston, which aims to empower women and eliminate racism. He currently a Research Advisory Group member with One Nation/One Project, National Arts in Public Health Initiative.
Brewer Eberly, MD, MACN
Family Medicine Physician, Fischer Clinic; McDonald Agape Fellow in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School
Brewer Eberly is a third-generation family physician at Fischer Clinic in Raleigh, N.C., and a McDonald Agape Fellow in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School. He completed his family medicine residency and chief residency at AnMed Health in Anderson, S.C. He is a fellow of both the Paul Ramsey Institute and the Theology, Medicine, & Culture Fellowship at Duke Divinity School.
Eberly has been published widely, including JAMA, the New Atlantis, and Christianity Today, with artwork on the cover of Academic Medicine and in the AMA Journal of Ethics. While the majority of his work is caring for his patients, his writing and research is rooted in the intersections of medicine, aesthetics, and Christian theology, with a particular eye toward medical trainee formation, the relationship between beauty and ethics, and the nourishment of weary clinicians.