Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies

Sayantani DasGupta, MD, MPH, is a faculty member in the Division of General Pediatrics and the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She teaches courses on illness narratives and narrative genetics at Sarah Lawrence College and is a prose faculty member in an intensive summer seminar on Writing the Medical Experience. She is the coauthor of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales and author of a memoir of her time at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor. Marsha Hurst, PhD, is director of the Health Advocacy master's program at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches courses on the history of health care and women's health. She writes and speaks on ethics and advocacy in health care, women's health, and advocacy education. She works with patient advocacy organizations, with individual professional and lay advocates, with policy advocates, and with community-based advocacy programs. She is a cosponsor at Sarah Lawrence of Writing the Medical Experience and has been involved in research and program development around the importance of narrative in advocacy.