Medicine has always stood at the intersection of different ways of knowing: objective and subjective, analytic and intuitive, scientific and humanistic. Drawing on figures from Pascal and William James to George Eliot, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sacks, this lecture considers the Two Cultures through the lens of medicine: what the theory and practice of medicine can teach us about the natural world and the self and the importance of imagination and scientific rigor alike in our ongoing attempts to understand the body and world around us.
Our speaker will be Matthew Morrison, M.D., an Emergency Physician in New York, who has been a lecturer at Yale in the Medical Humanities since 2019. He is a graduate of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (2012), and the Mt. Sinai-Morningside Emergency Medicine Residency (2015). He has taught with Yale’s Prison Education Initiative, Warrior-Scholar Project, and the New York Botanical Garden, and he has contributed writing to Film Comment, Singh’s Case-Based Neurology, and Mattu’s Avoiding Common Errors in the Emergency Department. His interests include the “two cultures”; physician-writers – including Bulgakov, Chekhov, Henry Marsh, Lisa Sanders, and Oliver Sacks; philosophy of science; medical ethics; and ‘prosaic Romantic’ thinkers – including Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, William James and Mikhail Bakhtin.