Senior Thesis Project

There is a divide between patients and caregivers that many are aware of. The goal of my work is to deepen awareness about this divide. I will achieve this by working with a dialysis patient as the subject in a visual narrative, informed by the clinical practice of narrative medicine. In Rita Charon’s 2006 book titled Narrative Medicine, she discusses four different areas in which doctors and patients have differing perspectives and/or beliefs: beliefs about mortality, the contextualization of illness, understanding of the cause of a disease, and emotional factors that lead to suffering. Informed by these four lenses I want to tell a patient's story, one that in medicine is traditionally left untold, but from an artist’s point of view. The intention of my exhibited work is to shed more light on the patient’s perspective of his illness and treatment, how he perceives it to be a part of his identity and how it affects his daily life.