What can literature teach medicine about how to see, listen, and remain attentive to another person?

Can reading help us understand illness not only as a clinical condition, but as a lived experience shaped by relationships, social circumstances, suffering, fear, and mortality? Taking Iona Heath’s John Berger: Ways of Learning as its point of departure, this conversation explores the fertile ground between literature and medicine.

For more than fifty years, Heath has read John Berger’s work; for nearly twenty, she shared with him a friendship and correspondence that profoundly influenced her practice as a general practitioner in inner-city London. His writing opened new ways of thinking about attention, responsibility, justice, listening, and care. In dialogue with journalist, essayist, and translator Maria Nadotti, the Italian editor and translator of Berger’s work, Heath will reflect on what literature can bring to clinical practice, and on how stories, words, and images can transform the way we encounter illness and those who live through it. An evening about a book, but above all about the ways in which reading can change how we see, listen, and care.