Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- If a Story is in You, It Has Got to Come Out: The Surgeon as a Writer
- Improving Palliative (End-of-Life) Care
- Narrative Medicine
Other Areas of Expertise
- Biography and Memoir
- Community Reads
- Health and Fitness
- Religion and Spirituality
- Science
- University Favorites
Endorsements
Pauline's compelling and moving keynote address set exactly the right tone for our conference. She is a lovely, open person, also, and she spent a great deal of time with the many conference participants who wanted to talk with her after she spoke.
- Ellen Ficklen
- Senior Editor/"Narrative Matters"
- Health Affairs
More Information
Pauline Chen
New York Times Columnist and Physician
Base: Boston, MA
- Photo: Joanne Chan
Pauline Chen is passionate about improving healthcare. Her particular concern is end-of-life (palliative) patient care. At the start of her book Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality she asks: ''Why are we so bad at taking care of the dying?'' The answer is a powerful mix of factors: a professional culture that, despite being intimately familiar with death, shrinks from discussing it with patients; the systematic training of young doctors to compartmentalize and dehumanize the patient; and the patients' indefatigable hope for recovery.
Through her practice as a transplant surgeon and her experiences of dealing with terminally ill patients, Dr. Chen came to understand that, commonly, doctors consider a patient's death as a sign of imperfect care and thus a personal failure. And doctors hate to fail. Doctors strive to combat their patients' sicknesses, but if the battle starts to become a losing one then doctors do not prepare their patients for inevitable death. Instead, the battle for life and denial of death continues with the frequent result that many patients die in a hospitals Intensive Care Unit while under-going painful treatment rather than at home with pain-management and in peace. Dr. Chen wants to change this practice.
Pauline Chen was educated at Harvard University and Northwestern University Medical School and completed her general surgery training at Yale University. Dr. Chen is the recipient of numerous awards including the UCLA Outstanding Physician of the Year Award in 1999 and the George Longstreth Humanness Award at Yale for most exemplifying empathy, kindness, and care in an age of advancing technology. She is a surgeon specializing in liver and kidney transplants and the treatment of cancer. Her first book, Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, was published by Knopf in January 2007.
She is an award-winning teacher who has also made keynote speeches broadly about the healthcare industry, but also to groups specifically concerned with palliative care.
Works by this Speaker
Final Exam
A brilliant transplant surgeon brings compassion and narrative drama to the fearful reality that every doctor must face: the inevitability of mortality.
When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she could not predict was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, she found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox–that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education and practice as she struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate sense of empathy and humanity. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.
