Medical Liturgy — Studies in Narrative, Ethics & Evidence

Coordinates of Reinvention

Explores how documentation becomes devotion and testimony becomes design.

For the Moral Body What Harvey Did for the Physical One

The Architecture of Record

In the past several months, I’ve been working to bring together three worlds that rarely meet: law, medicine, and the humanities. What began as a patient’s attempt to survive diagnostic silence has evolved into an evidentiary framework that now lives across those domains.

• The Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners has formally acknowledged six active investigations documenting continuity-of-care and diagnostic oversight failures — the legal archive.

• The national Health Humanities Network (HUM) — connecting Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and others — has begun circulating my applied framework, Medical Liturgy: Studies in Narrative, Ethics & Evidence, as a model for ethical record-keeping and system reform — the academic archive.

• The New York Times has received the case file and accompanying essays under formal editorial review — the public archive.

Together, these currents — legal, scholarly, and journalistic — form an architecture of legitimacy: a structure where lived evidence can be preserved, studied, and acted upon.

“It is possible—no, essential—to walk through something both sacred and unbearable. To hold in one hand the lexicon of science and in the other the quiet grammar of prayer. To keep belief and verification from tearing each other apart. To measure the invisible and still bow before it.”

- C L Gillespie

What Is Medical Liturgy?

Medical Liturgy is the ethical, ritual, and architectural grammar of evidence — a discipline that reimagines documentation itself as an act of devotion.

Where Narrative Medicine taught the field how to listen, Medical Liturgy teaches it how to remember .

Born out of correspondence with Dr. Rita Charon following De Motu Cordis: Light in Vein, it arose from a single conviction: the modern chart hears but forgets. The institution records but does not recall. To repair that fracture, medicine requires not another protocol, but a ritual architecture for evidence — a way of binding memory to accountability.

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From Testimony to Architecture

At its core, Medical Liturgy transforms witness into structure. It treats accuracy as prayer, continuity of care as covenant, and silence as a wound requiring ceremony.

Each act of record-keeping becomes a liturgical gesture — one that joins clinician, patient, and system in the shared work of remembrance .

Its foundational texts — The Declaration of Patient Fidelity, Testament of the Body, and The Parable of the Forgotten Record — form the discipline’s triptych of Foundation · Form · Faithfulness. Together they establish the moral canon that turns omission into design and suffering into pedagogy.

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A New Pedagogy of Continuity

At Columbia and other peer institutions, the framework envisions an applied curriculum of remembrance:

    •    Liturgies of Recall — workshops where clinicians learn to translate charting into ritual precision.

    •    Ethical Design Labs — collaborations among medicine, law, theology, and art to embed covenantal language within systems of care.

    •    Testament Studios — spaces where patients and scholars reconstruct erased evidence as art, ethics, and policy.

This pedagogy reframes continuity as architecture, advocacy as fidelity, and care as a designed moral structure .

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The Moral Oath

“I will not allow the record to forget what the body remembers.

I will treat continuity as covenant.

I will design care that endures.”

Purpose & Trajectory

The purpose of Medical Liturgy is not to romanticize suffering, but to design continuity — to make remembrance a structural act within systems that too easily forget. It exists at the intersection of medicine, law, and the humanities to answer a single moral question: how does a record become ethical?

Through this lens, the patient is not merely a subject of care but a co-architect of evidence. Testimony becomes infrastructure; charting becomes covenant. The goal is to replace reactive documentation with a pedagogy of fidelity — a living grammar for the continuity of care.

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The framework’s trajectory now extends across three pillars of influence:

    •    Legal: formal recognition through ongoing state investigations and procedural reviews.

    •    Scholarly: integration into the national Health Humanities Network (HUM) as a model for ethical documentation and reform.

    •    Public: dissemination through forthcoming essays, editorials, and visual studies, establishing Medical Liturgy as both language and architecture for remembering.

Each pillar strengthens the others — law granting accountability, scholarship granting continuity, and public discourse granting conscience. Together, they create a sustainable field where testimony no longer evaporates when institutions fail to listen.

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Toward a Discipline of Witness

As Coordinates of Reinvention unfolds within the HUM network, it serves as the living field journal of this new discipline — a documentation of how one life’s collapse becomes a blueprint for institutional repair.

In its pages, the language of faith meets the rigor of evidence, and the act of remembering becomes the highest form of care.

Coordinates of Reinvention

Field Notes from the Edge of Collapse

Coordinates of Reinvention is the living archive of Medical Liturgy — a daily field journal where theory is tested in real time against the moral physics of survival.

Each entry is written from inside the breakdown of a system that forgot how to listen, tracing how a single body’s record becomes a map for institutional repair.

The series began within the Health Humanities Network (HUM) — connecting Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and other programs — as the first applied field journal in the history of the discipline.

In it, lived collapse becomes evidence, and reflection becomes design: a framework where language itself performs the care it describes.

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Method

Each reflection follows the same liturgical arc:

    •    Invocation — attention as devotion.

    •    Break — the point of erasure or silence.

    •    Reconstruction — rebuilding language into structure.

    •    Coda — a single image, phrase, or line that carries forward as a diagnostic of meaning.

These are not essays; they are acts of architecture. They model how a practitioner or patient might translate their own experience into continuity — through form, precision, and compassion.

Enter the Coordinates

Light in Vein: Reflections

Reflections

Reflections from the Practice of Medical Liturgy.

Reflections from the Practice of Medical Liturgy.

A living journal within the field of Medical Liturgy—merging the clarity of a medical archive with the calm of a chapel.

Light in Vein: Reflections gathers writings that trace the moral body of care: moments when observation becomes reverence, and record becomes remembrance.

It invites sustained reading, quiet reflection, and the circulation of care-centered ideas—accessible to clinicians, scholars, and readers alike.

A space where medicine and ethics meet in devotion, restoring attention as the first act of healing.