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"""on a small radiant screen honeydew melon green are my scintillating bones""",,"Gwen Harwood's ""Bone Scan"" will always have a place in my heart when it comes to my inspiration for teaching Literature and my abiding interest in the humanities. Growing up in Singapore, the educational environment I was in did not prioritize literature and the humanities very much, and math and science were the core subjects that we were expected to focus on.
However, when I was 18, I had a literature teacher who taught and prepared us to appreciate unseen poetry for the A levels and among the poems she introduced us to was ""Bone Scan,"" which we later realized was her way of explaining her long absence from the classroom near our national exams. She was struggling with cancer and her teaching allowed us to appreciate that the poem's use of the word ""scintillating"" and the use of sibilants represented her desire to regard her struggle with cancer as a positive and hopeful journey rather than one to think about negatively and pessimistically. Although she eventually passed on, her influence continues to inspire me to be a better teacher and reader of literature, and continues to remind me of the importance of being attentive and committed to the text before us. I continue to return to ""Bone Scan"" and think how we approach, study, encounter, and teach literature reflects how we approach, encounter, and interact with others in our lives as well.","Gwen Harwood","""Bone Scan"" ",,2010,"Eunice Ying Ci Lim, 29, Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies",,,,,,on-a-small-radiant-screen,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021","Harwood, Gwen,Illness,Poetry,Self-Realization,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/458/HM_Bones_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Using Language to Humanize Healthcare",,"In this video, Dr. Michael Stanley celebrates a philosophy of healthcare that sees patients as more than the sum of their medical symptoms, drawing from the rich legacies of philosophy, mythology, and literature to understand individuals and their circumstances. Sir William Osler, one of the earliest proponents of such logic, articulates the manner in which the hospital can so often become a stage for the drama of interdependent human existence: ""The comedy, too, of life will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned towards him as the tragic.... yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go about among patients with a long face.""
In reflecting upon the influence of Osler and other mentors, Dr. Stanley suggests that a humanistic perspective plays a key role in helping doctors to be personally engaged in fostering interpersonal recognition and community through their work.",,,,,,,,,,,using-language-to-humanize-healthcare,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Doctors & Medicine,Illness,Language,Medical Personnel,Medicine,Philosophy,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/380/Cropped_Stanley_HM_Image_Osler.png,"Moving Image",,1,0
"“It’s not nonsense, it’s Shakespeare.”",,"Dr. Michael P. H. Stanley describes an encounter with a terminally ill patient who, in his pain and confusion, demands to leave the hospital ward in the middle of the night. While the patient’s pleas are initially regarded as “nonsense” or evidence of his delirium, Dr. Stanley recognizes the patient’s writings as lines from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. As Dr. Stanley highlights, his experience speaks to the lasting power of texts and stories to leave an indelible imprint on our minds, offering up a means of communication when all other words fail.",,"Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare",,,"Dr. Michael P. H. Stanley",,,,,,its-not-nonsense-its-shakespeare,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Communication,Doctors & Medicine,Drama,Illness,Language,Macbeth,Medicine,Patients,Shakespeare, William",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/351/shakespeare-67698_1920.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0
"The Fault in Our Stars and my Dad - Living through Leukemia in my Dad's shoes",,"Between the years of 2012-2014, the book The Fault in Our Stars written by John Green was one of the most popular books and films for teenagers. The book was such a hit Hollywood decided to make it a film, and they did a great job sticking to the original novel.
This novel is about two teenagers named Hazel and Augustus going through cancer and struggling to get through it until they meet each other through a support group, consisting of many other young cancer patients. My humanities moment happened in 2014 when my friend introduced to me this book. This included staying up all night, each night until I had finished reading the book so I could watch the film. At the age of 19, my dad had stage 4 Leukemia. This book always leaves me feeling emotional as it makes me think of my dad and all the battles he had to go through. Cancer is the hardest battle to fight and I’m so grateful that my dad, even though he was so close to death, continued fighting to survive. Without my dad, me or my siblings would not be here today. This novel is similar to my dad’s story because like the teenagers in the novel, they were fighting for their lives each day and going through lots of chemo and battling depression.
To read the novel and watch the film gave me a better understanding of what my dad’s life looked like from his shoes, living his everyday life being once a cancer patient. It was laying in a hospital bed all day, eating the same foods, being sick and exhausted all the time, and taking so many medications that didn’t seem to help. It made my dad feeling depressed because he couldn’t do much from being so sick, similar to the character Hazel and her story. When my dad got sick, he lost his friends because they thought they can no longer hang around him or weren’t wanting to support him. The character Hazel had similar troubles like my dad and was always sad and alone, rereading the same book and watching the same tv shows, that is until she met Augustus from the support group that she was forced to go to because of her parents.
If there is one gift I could give to my dad in the past, it would be to watch this film (not the story because he doesn’t like to read). I think watching this film would have gave my dad hope to know that he isn’t the only one fighting cancer and the characters Hazel and Augustus as well as millions of other teenagers in the world understand what he is going through.",https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffrNqDDyEgLPHj5IMLH6OMcedcAki7mNHeRVFKKol10/edit?usp=sharing,"The book The Fault in Our Stars by John Green",,"The year 2014 in my living room reading the book / watching the movie.","Cheyenne, 18 years old, living in Utah, a senior in high school",,,,,,the-fault-in-our-stars,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"12th grade English Teacher, Mrs. Layton!","Books & Reading,Bountiful, Utah,Cancer,Empathy,Fathers & Daughters,Film Adaptations,Green, John,Illness,Students,The Fault in Our Stars,Young Adult Literature",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/284/5886223907_9b8e22c9c4_o.jpg,Text,,1,0
"Haunted by Homer’s Sirens","This particular poem helped me to think about a challenge that I was facing in a different way, and helped me try to bring some sense to it. It was a catalyst to help me focus on the present and the “now,” and the worries that come with all of the things that you can’t control, in the future and the past, need to be chased out.","
About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?
I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.
In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.
",Homer,"The Odyssey",,,"Kevin Guthrie, founder/president, ITHAKA",,,,,,kevin-guthrie-homers-sirens,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Business Leaders,Classical Mythology,Coma,Families,Fathers & Sons,Homer,Illness,Literature,New York, New York,Poetry,Sports Accidents,The Odyssey,Time Perception",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/20/odyssey-960x590.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 "When Breath Becomes Air","What makes life worth living in the face of death? How do you handle the loss of all you’ve dreamed and what do you hope for when the future you’ve imagined is no longer possible? These are some of the questions with which Paul Kalanithi wrestles and for which he realizes his medical training offers few, if any, answers. When preparing to go to the hospital, he writes of packing three books: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, telling his wife, “I need to make sense of my cancer through literature.” His decision to write the memoir of his decline also served as an exercise in understanding.","Just as he was completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air, the memoir Kalanithi wrote in the midst of his illness, traces his journey from brilliant medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” to his life as a patient and new father faced with his own mortality. As his body declines, his spirit expands. “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life,” he writes, “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”