“Made Known in the Breaking of the Bread: Accompaniment and the Practice of Medicine”

Abstract

Accompaniment is a term drawn from Catholic social teaching that is used by secular organizations, such as Partners in Health and Health for Palestine, to frame their work for health justice in solidarity with the world’s poor. Through an exploration of the Emmaus story from Luke’s Gospel, this article seeks to frame medicine itself as a practice of accompaniment of the sick and, in particular, the sick poor. Medicine as accompaniment requires healers to draw near to, walk alongside, and break bread with the sick. This way of practicing medicine has implications for which communities’ clinicians preferentially accompany, where clinicians live, how they spend their time and money, and what rewards they seek from the practice of medicine. Medicine as accompaniment is a contemplative practice, a journey on which one comes to experience authentic communion with both God and neighbor.

“While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them...”

              Luke 24:15

Introduction

The Latin origin of the word “accompaniment” is cum pane, literally meaning “with bread” (Farmer and Gutiérrez 2013, 14). The word implies a sharing of resources and time, pointing to mutuality and, most important, friendship. It also calls to mind Eucharist, the sacramental breaking and sharing of bread-where Christians believe the suffering and risen Christ is present, “made known,” to the faithful. Framing the practice of medicine as an exercise in accompaniment will influence the particular kinds of communities practitioners preferentially engage, how to care for and with those communities, and the reward one seeks while accompanying the sick.

Talk of an encounter with Christ may seem out of place in contemporary bioethics discourse, but caring well for the sick, and especially the sick poor, is not. As noted below, secular NGOs have found the concept of accompaniment fruitful in motivating and sustaining their work, even when that work comes at great personal cost. In light of that fact, a discussion of the theological roots of accompaniment yields a vision of how medicine as accompaniment might respond well to the needs of those who are sick, especially among the poor. It also offers an answer to the human longing to overcome separation and to genuinely encounter our patients—in whom, according to the tradition from which accompaniment emerged, we encounter the Divine.

Accompaniment: Theology, Praxis, or Both?

Before starting medical school, I spent a year teaching English in Ramallah, Palestine, with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). My time there as an American volunteer was framed by former ELCJHL Bishop Munib Younan with the word “accompaniment” (Younan 2005, 22-35). Although accompaniment is comprised of values well-articulated within church tradition, it is a term first used theologically in the 1970s by Saint Oscar Romero in his final pastoral letter (Pope 2019, 134). It means to journey with a people or join companions on their way—like God with the Israelites in the desert or Christ with his frightened disciples on the road to Emmaus (Pope 2019, 135). Younan argues that accompaniment is most fully realized in the Incarnation, when God took on the full breadth and depth of the human experience (Younan 2005, 23). Although it has received most emphasis in Latin American liberation theology, Pope Francis names the art of accompaniment as the steady, reassuring pace and concomitant physical and spiritual proximity necessary for healing, liberation, and spiritual growth. Its practical and mystical approach “which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other” has been adopted as a key way for the church to engage with the poor, families, global mission, and pastoral care in the modern world (Francis 2013, 169).

Just outside of Bethlehem there is a Palestinian Refugee camp called Aida. There, a community health worker (CHW) project called Health for Palestine was started in 2017 in collaboration with locals and an international team based mostly out of Boston and New York. Its mission is to use a community driven approach to “maximize wellness and address health barriers via social accompaniment and creative integration with existing Palestinian healthcare facilities” (Health for Palestine n.d.). The heart of the program is social accompaniment of the local patient population by CHWs who themselves are from the camp.

This includes frequent home visits, attending specialty appointments with patients, helping them with medication adherence, and, simply, listening to and being with patients as they navigate their health in the midst of poverty, military occupation, and a fragmented healthcare system. This word, associated with a theological tradition, was used by a secular NGO to frame its engagement with grassroots organizing and a CHW program.

Uptake of the term accompaniment by medical organizations can be traced to the writings and work of physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer, founder of the NGO Partners in Health (PIH). Farmer has written extensively about the influence of liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor on PIH’s mission to bring the best possible care to impoverished and marginalized patients all over the world (Farmer 2003). One of the central ways PIH seeks to do so is through community health workers, who have been shown to improve health outcomes in many contexts—especially among the poor (Partners in Health 2013). CHWs almost always come from the community where the health intervention is undertaken. Furthermore, they often have the same medical condition as their patients. They conduct home visits, attend appointments, put on community education events, and in some contexts assist with basic primary care. Farmer himself has said of accompaniment:

To accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end…there’s an element of mystery, of openness, in accompaniment: I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads…sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person or people being accompanied, rather than by the accompagnateur (Farmer 2011).

A CHW project in rural Appalachia exemplifies this ethos. The initiative partnered patients who have diabetes with CHWs from the same community. Patients “objected when CHWs told them that their condition was under control and they no longer needed to be in the program. Some threatened to stop taking their medications so that the CHW would have to come back. Others simply refused to accept the CHWs decision and insisted they keep visiting them.” As a result, CHWs decreased home visit frequency but never dropped patients, thereby continuing to accompany them. For, the social support the CHWs provided was found to be an integral part of their patient’s continued control of their chronic disease (Crespo et al. 2020). Getting to a particular level of glucose control seemed to matter less to these patients than staying in relationship with their CHWs.

Theology of Accompaniment

These practices of accompanying the sick, as put forward by organizations like PIH and Health for Palestine, do result in improved health outcomes, particularly among the poor (Crespo et al. 2020; Chou et al. 2017; Roland et al. 2017; The Lancet Global Health 2017). Yet, accompaniment is not only to be understood as a technique for improving community health—it is a theological concept and praxis that points to the heart of God’s unwavering commitment to those on the margins. Accompaniment was first explicitly referenced by priest-theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez and Oscar Romero while ministering to the poor in the slums of Lima and under an oppressive El Salvadorian regime, respectively. Today, Pope Francis has made accompaniment a key tenet of the Catholic Church’s social mission and it has been integrated into Catholic Social Teaching (Francis 2013). Accompaniment is also embraced as a strategy for missions by denominations like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and ecumenical bodies like as the World Council of Churches (Padilla 2013, World Council of Churches 2005).

Two particular stories—from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—are often cited as evidence of God’s accompanying humanity in the midst of suffering and trials. The first is that of the Israelites in the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt, where God accompanied and directed his people in the form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Younan 2005, 23). The second is the Road to Emmaus story in Luke 24:13-35, in which Jesus chose to (1) come near and go with, (2) listen, (3) respond, (4) remain, and (5) break bread with his despondent disciples. The Emmaus story culminates in an encounter with the resurrected Christ, from which one can begin to derive a practical theology of accompaniment. This then can be applied to reconfigure medicine as a practice of accompanying the sick—especially the sick poor—rather than simply an exercise in curing illness.

Consider the state of the disciples at the beginning of the story. Just a week before, Jesus—the man they had hoped would liberate them from the domination of the Roman empire—entered Jerusalem on a colt to chants of “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Luke 19:28-44 NRSV). Popular support was on their side. The imminent triumph and liberation of the people of Israel appeared to be at hand, much to the chagrin of religious leaders and the Roman authorities who held political power.

For Jesus, the days leading up to Passover in Jerusalem were momentous. He cleared the temple of sellers, condemning the religious elite—as did the Prophet Isaiah—for exploiting the weak and believing themselves to be protected from God’s judgment by the rituals of the Temple (Isaiah 7:9-11a NRSV). He engaged with religious teachers who challenged his authority on topics like government and marriage (Luke 20:20-39 NRSV). Jesus undermined conventional expectations regarding wealth and generosity, lauding an impoverished widow who gave all she had, while dismissing those who gave large fortunes out of their prosperity (Luke 21:1-4 NRSV). He predicted the destruction of the temple and instituted the Eucharist on the night of the Passover meal, teaching his disciples that the greatest in his kingdom are those who are last—humble-hearted servants as opposed to those who are the powerful and mighty (Luke 21:5-6, 22:7-38 NRSV).

That same night, Jesus was betrayed by one of his closest followers. The rest of his followers fled or denied even knowing him. A kangaroo court condemned him to death, and the Roman authorities scourged him and sanctioned his public execution by crucifixion—a particularly abhorrent means meant to utterly humiliate political enemies and low-life criminals (Hengel 1977). Christ died after only a few hours on the cross and was buried—along with the hopes of his followers. These events, and the news that some of the women from their group had found the tomb empty, roiled the hearts of these men as they walked to Emmaus. They were not powerful. They lacked agency and wealth. An outside empire dominated their people.

In the Emmaus story, Jesus met his demoralized, suffering followers where they were, coming near and going with them. This nearness, this proximity, to those who are suffering—particularly to those who are poor or otherwise marginalized—is the first essential aspect of a theology of accompaniment. Stephen Pope writes that accompaniment, per theologian Roberto Goízueta, “is a form of long-term companionship advanced by physical proximity” (Pope 2019, 136). There is risk involved in this proximity, for it requires, in the words of Fr. James Keenan, “the willingness to enter into the chaos of another” (Keenan 2005). In that chaos, one may be exposed to the same structural and biological scourges that plague those who live on the margins, just as Saint Damien of Molokai contracted and eventually died from the leprosy that afflicted the community of lepers to whom he devoted his life (Daws 1984).

Most important, one may even be claimed as a friend by those one accompanies, thereby becoming bound to and beholden to their cause, and running the risk of being identified as one of them by others. It is much easier to keep those who suffer, especially the poor, at a distance. Goízueta writes:

We are happy to help and serve the poor, as long as we don’t have to walk with them where they walk, that is, as long as we can minister to them from our safe enclosures. The poor can then remain passive objects of our actions, rather than friends, compañeros and compañeras with whom we interact. As long as we can be sure that we will not have to live with them, and thus have interpersonal relationships with them, we will try to help “the poor”-but, again, only from a controllable, geographical distance (Goizueta 2009, 199).

There are no “safe enclosures” in accompaniment—only the sharing of lives in a mutual pursuit of liberation, justice, and friendship.

After joining the men on their journey, Jesus asked what they were discussing. He then listened to them recount the crushing disappointments of that week, how their hopes had been dashed. While reflecting on accompaniment in his first encyclical Evangelii Gaudiium, Pope Francis states, “We need to practice the art of listening, which is more than simply hearing. Listening, in communication, is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness without which genuine spiritual encounter cannot occur. Listening helps us to find the right gesture and word which shows that we are more than simply bystanders” (Francis 2013, 171). True listening is both a spiritual and practical act. It creates intimacy and fosters trust. It invites both parties to an encounter with the other, and to leave changed. It also equips the listener with the tools to respond well, whether in word or deed.

True listening which fosters authentic encounter always demands a response. After listening to their disappointment, Jesus responded by admonishing the two disciples and reminding them, using scripture, that self-sacrificial, enemy-loving suffering and death—followed by resurrection—was always meant to be the God’s answer to the world’s violence (Luke 24:25-27 NRSV). In accompaniment, after first listening fully to the story of the one who is suffering—whether from illness or poverty or structural injustice, among others—one must respond.

Sometimes, however, the apt response is silence. At times a response involves “…small daily acts of solidarity in meeting the real needs which we encounter,” and solidarity, Pope Francis continues, “is something more than a few sporadic acts of generosity. It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few” (Francis 2013, 188). Always, responding in solidarity includes striving to eliminate the structural drivers of poverty and other injustices. Francis’ use of the word solidarity calls to mind “the physical, social, and psychological presence that characterizes accompaniment…that is much more demanding than either service or even solidarity as it is usually interpreted” (Pope 2019, 136).

It is more demanding because one can express solidarity with a person or people, or cause, and then subsequently retreat into a safe enclosure. That is not how Jesus accompanied these men on the way to Emmaus. When they arrived at their destination, he initially continued walking along the road without them, but stayed for dinner at their behest. There are a number of possible interpretations of this exchange. Christ may have been honoring customs surrounding hospitality. He also could have been simply avoiding travel at night given the late hour. However, one may note that his choice to remain with the disciples echoes Farmer’s claim that accompaniment involves, “sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person or people being accompanied” (Farmer 2011). This reading offers the perspective that those seeking to accompany another ought to remain if the person or people they have bound themselves to determine the work is not complete.

Then, Luke tells us, “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight” (24:30-31 NRSV). All of the previous steps Jesus took to accompany his disciples culminated in the breaking of the bread. At that moment, they encountered Jesus resurrected from the dead, a reality that had—until that moment—been hidden from them. Jesus vanished but, according to Christian tradition, he never stopped accompanying them.

According to Roberto Goizueta, accompaniment is “a fundamentally religious sacramental act” (Goizueta 1995, 209). A relationship of accompaniment is ontologically the act of breaking bread together—cum pane. In this way, it points to the sacrament of the Eucharist. When accompanying an individual or a group of people, one is not literally consuming the body and blood. But, it makes possible true communion—even friendship—with our neighbor. In this way, the theology of accompaniment facilitates a mystical encounter with God in the other. Encountering the Divine does not require four walls or an altar—although accompaniment does not replace the sacraments. Instead, the transcendent reality that is present in the sacraments is found also in the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, imprisoned, and sick—the “least of these” referenced in the sheep and goats parable—that those who seek to follow the way of Christ are called to accompany as part of their salvation (Matthew 25:31-46 NRSV).

Medicine as Accompaniment

Much work will be needed to articulate and develop how a vision of “breaking bread” with the ill—particularly those on the margins—can lead medical practitioners of all backgrounds into “contemplation…[an] encounter with God” (Farmer and Gutiérrez 2013, 81). As an initial step in this direction, I will introduce three ways a theology of accompaniment might radically shape how healers live into their vocation of being present to those who are sick.

First of all, a theology of accompaniment will lead medical practitioners to reckon with Catholic Social Teaching’s option for the poor and otherwise marginalized, which was compellingly articulated by liberation theologians like Gutiérrez (1988)^, Cone (1970), and Raheb (2014). This theology echoes forth in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free (Luke 4:18 NRSV).

Liberation theology, as a movement, proved to be politically and theologically controversial in some quarters, with things reaching their nadir in a 1984 report by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Ratzinger 1984). With that said, the central insights of liberation theology have been taken up into the heart of the Church and the heart of its Social Teaching. There have been high-level reconciliatory meetings between key liberation theologians and the Church. For example, Gustavo Gutiérrez has met and celebrated Mass with Pope Francis (McElwee 2019).

This theology lends language and creates an imagination to engage with the biblical narrative from the Exodus to the prophets to the beatitudes to the life and death of Jesus. Time and time again, God’s character is demonstrated through solidarity with and working on behalf of the poor, not because the poor are more virtuous or better than other humans, but because of God’s goodness (Farmer and Gutiérrez 2013, 32). Further, Pope Francis writes:

For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political or philosophical one. God shows the poor “his first mercy”…We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them (Francis 2013, 198).

Medicine as a vocation has privileged access to the poor insofar as all fall ill, and the sick are included in the list of the kinds of people broadly characterized as “the poor” in and with whom God is particularly present (Matthew 25:34-36 NRSV). As such, medicine, in its “fundamental commitment to be…in the presence of those who are in pain,” is particularly well positioned to understand itself as a practice in accompanying the sick (Hauerwas 1985). And because the world of the ill is one of alienation from the world of the healthy, the sick are among the poor whom we are to attend preferentially.

Yet, Paul Farmer pushes further, claiming, “Making a preferential option for the poor ought to be easy in medicine—just follow the pathology, and that’s where it leads you” (Farmer and Gutiérrez 2013, 23). It remains that, although all become sick at one time or another, the economically poor and socially marginalized—including but not limited to ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and sexual/gender minorities-consistently suffer higher rates of morbidity and mortality in both the United States and on a global scale (Farmer 2003; Mayer et al. 2008; Wilkinson and Marmot 1998), and the poor continue to die prematurely from treatable diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS.

Jesus preferentially situated himself alongside the poor and weak. In medicine, we practitioners for the most part have failed to do the same. Rather, our best resources consistently go to those who can pay for them, while those on the margins die what Haitians call “stupid deaths”—deaths that are preventable if only we had the will to bring medical resources to those who need them most (Farmer 2003). The sick poor are, in a sense, doubly poor, and the practitioner who accompanies them will partner with them in a mutual pursuit of justice.

Second, medicine as accompaniment will also reshape practitioners’ posture toward their patients. They will learn that they go to the margins, “not to save those there,” Father Greg Boyle writes, “but in order that the margins may disappear” (Boyle 2019). For accompaniment, at its heart, embraces a new relation characterized by kinship—by binding oneself to a person or people (and often to their place) in the pursuit of the beloved community. Medical practitioners who accompany a particular community will set aside their grand plans for and solutions to the problems faced by that community. In accompaniment, no one is a bystander. Instead, one throws in one’s lot with the other and is thereby caught up in the life and suffering, the “chaos,” of the accompanied.

Third, accompaniment calls practitioners to consider a radical implication: living in proximity with those they serve. The potential power and joy of such proximity is exemplified in the story of Dr. Thomas Catena. “Dr. Tom” is a physician-surgeon and the medical director of Mother of Mercy Hospital in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Verini 2015). Catena volunteered with the Catholic Diocese of El Obeid to help start the hospital in 2008. Upon his arrival, Catena did not receive a warm welcome, for there was a deep distrust of foreigners and potential colonizers (Verini 2015). Years of persistent work and episodes like one in which Dr. Tom donated his own blood to the hemorrhaging wife of a previously hostile local administrator (she lived) slowly earned the trust of the community (Verini 2015).

Catena’s status among the Nuban people only solidified, however, after a civil war broke out in 2011. The northern regime began to assault the mountains, seeking to depopulate the region of its Indigenous people. All expatriates and volunteers were ordered to leave. Dr. Tom refused. “What they were in a sense saying,” he recounts, “was, ‘Tom, your life is worth more than these people here.’ And I said that’s a bunch of…nonsense. Their lives are as equal as my life is. In the eyes of God, we’re all created equal” (Verini 2015). Catena remained as the sole physician in a hospital with a catchment area of 500,000–750,000 people (Bartholet 2013). The hospital was bombed multiple times, likely as a result of Catena speaking out and publicly condemning the ethnic cleansing (Caritas Internationals 2014; Verini 2015). He and the medical staff have continued to treat whatever and whomever comes through the door—trauma, measles, and obstetric emergencies—and they are constantly on call. On the goals of the mission, Dr. Tom has remarked:

[the] approach is to enter into this work with the people, and to work along with them. We do it in a low impact way. We don’t come in with 20 doctors, take over a hospital, and do all the work ourselves. The whole thrust of the church and diocese is that we want the hospital and infrastructure to last for 50 or 100 years (Bartholet 2013).

The leader of the northern regime, convicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir, was deposed by the military in April of 2019. A tenuous, uneasy ceasefire has followed. Today, the hospital remains busy. Dr. Tom married a local woman named Nasima, and they recently adopted a young boy, Francis Gene, from South Sudan.

Catena exemplifies medicine as accompaniment. He, together with the local church, identified a community on the margins, a community which lacked health care and, in the eyes of the people’s own government, did not possess even basic human rights. Catena then chose to throw in his lot with this particular community. His approach was not one of simple humanitarian relief or even solidarity that reserves the right to leave at any moment. When the war broke out, he remained because those he accompanied had a claim on him. If they could not leave, he could not leave. This calls to mind, again, Greg Boyle, “We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away” (Boyle 2010, 190). Dr. Tom has now bound himself to the Nuban people as a husband and father, and he looks forward to the day Mother of Mercy can be completely run by Nubans, among whom he will continue as one who has been adopted—naturalized, so to speak. And after listening to the voice of those he was accompanying, Dr. Tom became an advocate. For, the healer’s privileged access to the sick often means taking action outside the operating or exam room on behalf of and in partnership with the accompanied community.

Understanding medicine as accompaniment does not require all of us to practice medicine in a conflict zone, serve in the streets of Calcutta like Mother Teresa, or minister to a leper colony as did St. Damien of Molokai. For example, consider nurse and physician Cicely Saunders whose “systematic attention to patient narratives” and willingness to develop relationships with the dying gave her the “idea that she might find a home for dying people to find peace in their final days” (Richmond 2005, 238). Accompanying the suffering led her to find St. Christopher’s, the first modern hospice institution, and to profoundly shape the practice of palliative care. She herself spent her last days at St. Christopher’s. Perhaps accompaniment will lead someone to work as a personal care attendant in a rural nursing home, giving excellent care to and advocating for those often forgotten and neglected. It might lead a young nurse to settle down in the poor urban center near the hospital instead of commuting from the suburbs. One may choose to work in relative obscurity as a physician in northern Minnesota with the Bemidji Area Indian Health Service, or make sure one’s hospital or clinic accepts Medicaid and patients unable to pay. Some may take the necessary time to experience the history and current reality of the patient populations they care for through volunteering and other forms of community engagement. This may serve as a foundation to inspire deeper levels of accompaniment. Others may be called to give more radical support to those in need, acknowledging their call to be near both geographically and financially.

Again, medicine as accompaniment requires being in proximity with, listening to, and committing oneself to the people one is accompanying. It requires “skin in the game”—accompaniment cannot be lived from safe enclosures (Goizueta 2009, 199). Not all are called to become a missionary at the margins, yet every healer has the ability to care for the excluded, sick, and poor. Steps toward a life and practice of accompaniment are accessible to all. Each must discern these in community, through personal reflection, and with peers who share a similar vision. And one must keep in mind that steps toward enmeshment of one’s life with the communities one accompanies may come at financial, personal, and/or social cost, even the cost of health or life. Jesus told those around him, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me,” and soon after Jesus carried his cross to his own execution (Luke 9:23 NRSV). Tom Catena surrendered a comfortable, middle-class suburban medical practice. Cicely Sanders spent most of her life among the dying. Countless others have labored quietly in unremarkable places in seemingly ordinary ways, dying to themselves as they faithfully walk with those to whom they are called.

What are the intrinsic rewards that allow these and others to leave so much behind? According to theological tradition, such decisions are to be motivated and sustained by an encounter with God in the sick. For Christians, the end of accompaniment of the poor is communion with God, who is revealed in Jesus. Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that accompanying the poor, hungry, and sick is not

simply as an expression of the “social dimension” of faith. No, it is much more than that; such action has an element of contemplation, of encounter with God, at the very heart of the work of love. And this encounter is not “merited” by any work; it is the gratuitous gift of the Lord. This is what the passage [Matthew 25] in question makes known to us, and in doing so evokes our surprise (When did we see you hungry?”) (Farmer and Gutiérrez 2013, 81).

The impetus, sustenance, and final reward of medicine as an exercise in accompaniment are an encounter with God, a gift which transcends corporeal reality.

This gift draws all parties—the sick and those seeking to accompany them—close together. Medicine as accompaniment is not self-righteous self-denial, nor is it merely a way to improve health outcomes. Accompaniment, rather, is a journey learning to live in step with the love of self and neighbor—and, in Christian tradition, love of God—at the “limits of your longing” (Rilke 2005, I, 59). As God accompanied creation in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and as Jesus accompanied his disciples on the way to Emmaus, healers can accompany their patients if they are willing to give themselves away in a life of mutual communion with others.

Biographical Note

C. Phifer Nicholson Jr., is a medical student at Duke School of Medicine with a BA in Religion and Middle Eastern Studies from Wofford College. His professional and research interests include health equity, theology and medicine, ethnography, global health, and social medicine. When outside the hospital and classroom, he enjoys music, reading, cooking (read, eating), playing ultimate frisbee, and trying to get lost in the mountains.

ORCID iD

C. Phifer Nicholson Jr. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5859-5658