The Department of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School is hosting filmmaker Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH, and Betty Clark, MDiv, as featured speakers for the annual Howe Endowed Lecture Series on Thursday, May 7.
Dr. Zitter and Chaplain Clark are the subjects of The Chaplain & The Doctor, a documentary film exploring the relationship between physicians and chaplains, highlighting Clark and Zitter’s relationship while serving on the palliative care team at The Wilma Chan Highland Hospital Campus, a level-one trauma center in Oakland, California.
A special screening of The Chaplain & The Doctor on Wednesday, May 6 at 5:30 p.m. is being held in the Albert Sherman Center Auditorium. The annual Howe Endowed Lecture Series, featuring a discussion with Zitter and Clark, will take place the following day on May 7 at noon, in the Albert Sherman Center Auditorium and on Zoom. Members of the UMass Chan campus community are invited to attend both programs.
Zitter, the film’s director, said the documentary emerged from years of documenting conversations and insights in palliative care settings.
“Betty and I worked together for a long time, starting in 2011. Over the course of these 15 years, I learned how chaplaincy was really fundamental to the care of patients and how important spiritual healing is,” Zitter said. “I started not planning to make a film. I was writing a lot of articles with the material. But in 2018, the project really started to take shape.”
In presenting the film to the UMass Chan community, Zitter and Clark hope audiences gain a deeper understanding of how doctors and chaplains can work collaboratively, what it means to work with spiritual care and the essential role chaplains can play in supporting patients.
“What I want people to get out of this film is to understand that the spiritual part of a person and the physical part of the person are the same person,” Clark said. “Sometimes, it’s not so much the body as it is the emotions; it’s not what’s wrong with someone, it’s what happened to them.”
The Howe Lecture was established by UMass Chan in 1984. The series honors Phyllis M. Howe and sponsors an annual lectureship in medical ethics, which identifies and discusses current dilemmas in moral and ethical medical decision-making.
