Menu
Arthur Kleinman
Harvard University
Arthur Kleinman, MD, author of The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor (Penguin/Viking 2019), is one of the most renowned and influential scholars and writers on psychiatry, anthropology, global health, and cultural and humanistic issues in medicine. Educated at Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, he has taught at Harvard for over forty years. He is currently a professor of global health and social medicine and of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and was the Fung Director of Harvard’s Asia Center from 2008 to 2016. Kleinman is the author of six other books, including The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition, widely taught in medical schools. His co-edited volumes include Reimagining Global Health with the late Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, his former students, along with volumes on AIDS in China, depression cross-culturally, and social care for social suffering among the poor and marginalized worldwide. He was the senior editor of the first World Mental Health Report. Kleinman is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recently was elected an Honorary Academician of Academic Sinica in Taiwan. He is currently directing a project on Social Technology for Global Aging and Eldercare in China that involves faculty and students from six of Harvard's schools as well as a number of his former students who are professors in China.
Talk Information:
Care and Caregiving in the Context of Global Health
September 10, 2022 | 9:00 AM
Global health has attracted students and practitioners from around the world who are passionately committed to deliver high quality care. Yet in many global health projects the quality of care goes unexamined and there are suspicions that it often is poor. That paradox is part of a wider crisis affecting care and caregiving in professional and family settings worldwide. In this talk and discussion, I will describe the core elements of high quality care; the barriers to achieving high quality care; and what can be done to remedy this unfortunate situation. In discussing these issues, I will draw upon my recent book The Soul of Care, the work of the late Paul Farmer on accompaniment and social care, and my current research on Social Technology for Global Aging and Eldercare in China.
For further reading:
Kleinman, Arthur. 2019. The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor. New York: Penguin/Random House.
Introduction (pages 1-14) from Farmer, P., Kleinman, A., Kim, J., & Basilico, M. (Eds.). 2013. Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kleinman, Arthur. “Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care” from Biehl, J. and Adams, V. (Eds.). The Arc of Interference. Duke University Press. Forthcoming in 2023.