Maurizio Fava Lecture Series on Well-Being: “Reading Kafka in the Hospital Cafeteria – Reflections on 17 years of Literature and Medicine at MGH”

Co-sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry and the Office for Well-Being

The Maurizio Fava Lecture Series on Well-Being was created to honor Dr. Fava’s vision and advocacy for well-being of the MGH community.

Reading literature has been shown to increase empathy and enhance clinical and academic skills. At MGH we have had a monthly literature and medicine discussion group for 17 years. How has reading and discussing the works of Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, and many other writers improved our personal and professional lives? Can poetry and prose heal burnout? In this lecture Dr. Koven will address these questions and also trace the long tradition of narrative in medicine.

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to: 

• Explore the role has narrative played in the evolution and practice of medicine.
• Analyze how reading literature can improve patient care and caregiver satisfaction.
• Understand how writing literary narrative contributes to clinical and academic medical faculty well-being.

Presenter: Suzanne Koven, MD, received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training and chief residency in medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for over 30 years. She is an associate professor of medicine and global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and holds the Valerie Winchester Family Endowed Chair in Primary Care Medicine at Mass General. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, NewYorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in The Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association. Dr. Koven co-directs the Media and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School and speaks to a wide variety of audiences on literature and medicine and the role of women in medicine. Her essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021. Her memoir, the Mirror Box, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2026.