I.S. Opens a Door

by John Hopkins

Name: Danny George ’04
Hometown: Shaker Heights, Ohio
Major: English
I.S. Title: Can Narrative Heal? Honoring the Consciousness, Creativity, and Self-Authorship of Sick Patients and Re-Humanizing Health Care Through the Art of Narrative
Advisor: Debra Shostak

Danny George’s 2004 I.S. on therapeutic uses of narrative, especially with elderly Alzheimer’s sufferers, has landed him a promising collaboration with a geriatric neurologist at Case School of Medicine.

"I’m not cut out to be a doctor,” Danny George ’04 says. "But in my heart I’ve always considered myself to be a healing type, and one thing a liberal arts school does is allow you to take the skills you have and figure out how to employ them where your heart is.”

George is a writer. An English major at Wooster, he was chief staff writer on The Voice for three years, published poetry in Year One, and worked on The Artful Dodge literary magazine. His I.S. focused on therapeutic uses of narrative, including its use in treating elderly patients with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Back home in Shaker Heights after graduating, George began looking for others who shared his interest in narrative therapy. He found Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., a geriatric neurologist at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Whitehouse’s pioneering research contributed to the development of the first medications approved to treat Alzheimer’s. George decided to go see him.

"His secretary said he was out of town,” he recalls, "so I literally slipped a copy of my I.S. under his door. A week or so later, I got an e-mail from him.”

The e-mail led to a face-to-face meeting and a job as Whitehouse’s research assistant.

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