Mercy, Magic, and the Medical Humanities: An Interview with Jussi Valtonen
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What is narrative medicine and why does it matter for clinicians?
Welcome to the Madden America Podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. Lucy Feltanin is a neuropsychologist and researcher with the Finnish Center for Evidence-Based Orthopedics, Professor of Writing at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, and a columnist for the Finnish Medical Journal. He works clinically as a neuropsychologist, and his research and writing sit at the crossroads of mind and brain through the health humanities. U C is also an award winning novelist. His novel, They Know Not What They Do, won Finland's top literary prize and has been translated into multiple languages. Alongside his scholarly work and writing, he leads the Health, Narrative and Arts Initiative at UniArtz Helsinki, which offers training and narrative skills for professionals in health care and social work and brings literary, artistic, and humanistic ways of thinking into conversation with clinical care.
In this conversation, we turn to UC's recent work helping to build narrative medicine groups in Finland, first with clinicians and now increasingly with neurological patients. as well as his broader effort to show why the humanities are one of the rare places where clinicians and patients alike can recover forms of attention, listening, interpretation, and moral imagination that dehumanized healthcare systems seem to erode. So you see, welcome back to the Madden America podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you here again. Thank you so much for having me. This interview emerged uh out of a discussion that we were having via email about the narrative medicine groups you've been leading and the kind of results you've been getting out of them, what you've been learning from them.
So as we dive in, can you tell us what these groups are about? So narrative medicine.
is an approach in which um the arts and humanities are used to inform clinical work. And there are many different sides to this work, but I think at its core it's reminding us all that life is much broader and more complex and richer than sometimes we remember in clinical work. And it's also about reminding us of our shared humanity, uh both among clinicians, but also between clinicians and patients and all of humanity.
How does a narrative medicine workshop end up in a hospital system? Uh what are the sort of forces that that make that possible?
In our case, what happened was um I had been postdocing in New York where I um was in contact with the narrative medicine team at Columbia University, who've been doing this work for a long time. And I was really inspired by their work, um pioneered by Rita Sharon and her colleagues. And I also ended up collaborating with Brad Lewis, who also works at the intersection of arts, humanities, and medicine, and also does work in narrative psychiatry. And when I came back to Finland, I got a job teaching creative writing at the University of the Arts in Helsinki. And I mentioned this work um to my colleagues, and I said that I'd been really inspired by it. And I was wondering if we could maybe try something like
Yeah. And my colleagues were really encouraging And we were lucky enough to get um a grant from a Finnish foundation to start piloting some of this work. And in the beginning when we started doing this, We organized these groups for clinicians working in the Helsinki City healthcare and social services sector. And in the beginning we didn't really know if anybody would show up and what Finnish clinicians would think about reading poetry and short stories together and and doing creative writing exercises. But people did show up and as it turned out, um the responses were really positive. Our feedback was literally at ceiling already from the beginning, which to us suggested that there's There seems to be room for this kind of work in in Finnish healthcare.
And the basic idea really is that um We use the literary arts to inform clinic clinical work to sort of get ourselves out of these little boxes that clinical work so easily kind of puts us in, um, where we tend to forget what life is really about and what what people are really about in a more open-ended or broader sense than um through diagnostic criteria.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is narrative medicine and why does it matter for clinicians?
0:04–5:03
2
How did Jussi bring narrative medicine from Columbia to Finland?
5:03–12:00
3
What do the early clinician groups look like and how do participants respond?
12:00–20:14
4
How do close‑reading and creative‑writing exercises build clinical listening skills?
20:14–28:21
5
What did the research reveal about language shifts like wonder, magic, and connection?
28:21–36:52
6
How does the concept of neuro‑dualism explain mind‑brain interactions?
36:52–45:08
7
How are narrative groups being adapted for neurological patients?
45:08–49:15
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