The Medical Humanities | What Is a Note?: Medical Records and Narrative in the Age of AI

With Guest Speaker: Sari Altshuler (Associate Professor of English, Founding Director, Health, Humanities, and Society Program Northeastern University)

Clinical notes take time. The work often spills over after hours. Al scribes promise much-needed respite for the overworked physician. But, before we adopt the technology wholesale, we have to ask what clinical notes are and what we want them to be. This talk takes stock of the narrative qualities of notes-especially as they have changed in recent decades-and considers what new training and expertise physicians will to adopt Al scribes responsibly.

About the Speaker

Sari Altschuler’s research focuses primarily on American literature and culture before 1865, disability studies, and the health humanities, broadly understood. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Penn Press, 2018) and Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, forthcoming 2026) as well as co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU, 2023) with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald and Health Humanities: An Introduction (under contract with NYU) with Corinna Treitel. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, and the medical journal The Lancet. She serves on the advisory board of American Quarterly and the editorial boards of Early American Literature and American Literature. Her research has received awards from the Society of Early Americanists, the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic, the Disability History Association, and the Library Company of Philadelphia and long-term funding from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Wellesley College Newhouse Center for the Humanities. She was an assistant professor of English and core faculty member of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University before joining the Northeastern faculty. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was on leave as a faculty fellow at the Wellesley College Newhouse Center for the Humanities and an invited professor at Université de Paris – Paris Diderot.

Currently she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, an award-winning multi-site and online exhibition about the multi-sensory experiences of reading with David Weimer, and chairs the Critical Health Humanities seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center with Amy Boesky and David Jones.