Getting to Know…Caroline Wellbery

December 6, 2007

Caroline Wellbery, professor of family medicine, rightfully refers to herself as a “jill of all trades.” In the classroom and as assistant deputy editor of American Family Physician, a peer-reviewed journal whose editorial offices are based at GUMC, Wellbery has made a career out of incorporating the humanities into medical education and practice. With both a PhD in literature and a medical degree, Wellbery has used her unique skill set to introduce scores of students to a new way of thinking about the patient experience. We caught up with her in her office in Kober-Cogan on a snowy December morning.

What are your roles here in the Department of Family Medicine and elsewhere at Georgetown?

I definitely have multiple roles, and the advantage is that I don’t get bored, because I’m involved in all aspects of medical education. I supervise residents in the Family Practice residency program at Colmar Manor, just over the Northeast District line in Maryland, and I teach predoctoral medical students in the first, third, and fourth years. In addition, I am an editor of American Family Physician, under Editor-in-Chief Jay Siwek, chair of the Department of Family Medicine. Finally, I do clinical work at an urgent care center not related to Georgetown.

Is there a common thread that ties all these roles together?

The field of medical humanities involves the use of art and literature to tell stories that make medical concepts relevant to students, who haven’t really had the first-hand experiences with patients to help them understand that relationship. It is a teaching tool that allows people to deepen their understanding of life. There are so many great artistic materials out there—musical, literary, etc.—that represent people’s deepest experiences with health and medicine.

How interested are medical students in incorporating these themes into their education?

There’s a lot of interest in it, but students also need their basic biochemistry and physiology. It’s much easier to make the case for including stories of the “human condition” in undergraduate education; it’s a little more difficult to convince students who are learning a professional skill.

But I do teach an Introduction to Health Care Selective for first-year medical students, and the students love it. I use these materials to teach basic issues like doctor-patient communication or how to have difficult conversations with patients. In this way, I can make these concepts more skill-based but still interesting. I also integrate a lot of these medical humanities concepts into clinical courses at the medical school.

What research or projects are you working on now?

I’ve actually been building a medical humanities Web site that will be a resource for educators who want to incorporate these materials into their teaching practices. It’s still a work in progress, but it includes different teaching units, a library of poetry, essays, and visual art, and even videos demonstrating doctor-patient interactions to be used as teaching tools. The site is a resource organized both by types of materials (poems, etc.) and by clinical topic, like obesity.

Where can readers find this site?

I encourage faculty, staff and students to visit the site at http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/familymedicine/imh and email me with suggestions and feedback.

It doesn’t sound like you have much spare time, but what else are you involved in outside of work?

I’m interested in creative writing. For a while, I was writing a lot of semi-autobiographical articles for the Washington Post…I wrote one about biking, for example, because I’ve biked to work for seven years. Then I started wrote a novel, so that took up a lot of my time. It’s about a young woman who fakes her way into a medical school and pretends to be a medical student. Now I’m working on another one—I hope one day to have a published novel. 



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