upstate medical university center for bioethics and humanities

Rebecca Garden

Rebecca Garden, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities. She earned her doctorate in English from Columbia University. Before coming to Upstate, she was Associate Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University’s medical school.

Dr. Garden teaches courses in the health humanities for the Consortium for Culture and Medicine. She lectures and leads discussion groups in Upstate’s ethics courses for medical, nursing, and health care professions students. She teaches in a required MPH course and co-leads ethics seminars for social workers and medicine residents. She also teaches an elective that is linked to a research project—involving Marjorie DeVault and Michael Schwartz of Syracuse University—called Campaign for Deaf Access: Expanding Communication in Health Care.

Dr. Garden’s research draws on narrative, critical theory, and literature and the arts to examine social relations in health care and the social constructions of health, illness, and disability. She has been published in journals ranging from New Literary History and the Journal of Medical Humanities to the Journal of Clinical Ethics and the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

In addition to teaching, Dr. Garden is on the Literature and Science Committee for the Modern Language Association; Literature and Medicine Affinity Group Leader for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities; Executive Director of the Consortium for Culture and Medicine; and Associate Editor of The Healing Muse, Upstate Medical University’s journal of literary and visual art.

Dr. Garden may be reached at 315.464.5404 or at gardenr@upstate.edu.

Dr. Garden's current CV.

Selected Publications

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Garden R. "Language, Identity, and Belonging: Deaf Cultural and Narrative Perspectives." Journal of Clinical Ethics, Summer 2010; 21(2):159-62.

Garden, R. "Disability and Narrative: New Directions for the Medical Humanities." Medical Humanities. December 2010;36(2):70-74. Editor’s choice selection for online issue.

Garden R. "Sympathy, Disability, and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree." Journal of Medical Humanities. September 2010;31(3):223-42.

Garden R. "Illness and Inoculation: Narrative Strategies in Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796)."). In: Laflen A, Block M, eds. Prescribing Gender in Medicine and Narrative. New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2010:64-94.

Garden R. "Telling Stories about Illness and Disability: The Limits and Lessons of Narrative." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Winter 2010;53(1):121-135.

Garden, R. "Expanding Clinical Empathy: An Activist Perspective." Journal of General Internal Medicine 24(1), January 2009:122-5.

Garden R and Yoo Murphree HJ. "Class and Ethnicity in the Global Market for Organs: The Case of Korean Cinema." Journal of Medical Humanities, December 2007; 28(4):213-29.

Garden R. "The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities." New Literary History, Summer 2007; 38(3): 551-568.

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