Consultants
Christian Hervé holds a PhD in Medicine (1978) and in Human Biology (1988). He is currently a Professor of Legal Medicine and Medical Law. Dr. Hervé is the Director of “Laboratoire d’éthique médicale et de médecine légale” (University Paris-Descartes) and of the department “Consultations et santé publique du Centre d'Accueil et d'Hébergement, Soins Hospitaliers de Nanterre.” He is the Vice-President of “Union Nationale des Réseaux de Santé.” Dr. Hervé is the Director of Courrier de la Société Française et Francophone d’éthique médical and a member of the editorial board of Aporia (University of Toronto), Corps (CNRS), Revue générale de droit médical (University of Poitiers) and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA).
Diego Gracia is now Emeritus Professor of the Complutense University of Madrid, where he was Full Professor of History of Medicine and where he coordinated a Master’s degree in Bioethics. He received a diploma in Clinical Psychology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca, and is also a specialist in Psychiatry. He is the Director of the Xavier Zubiri Foudation. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Director of the Bioethics Institute of the Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud [Health Sciences Foundation]. His most important publications include: Etica y vida: Estudios de bioética (4 Vols., 1998); Medice, cura te ipsum: Sobre la salud física y mental de los profesionales sanitarios (2004), and Como arqueros al blanco: Estudios de bioética (2004).
Initially trained as a Medical doctor, he has been President of the "Nation Council of Ethics for the Live Sciences" since 2015. He was Full Professor of Pathological Anatomy at the Lisbon School of Medicine, University of Lisbon (2004-12) and the NOVA Medical School (1996-2004) as well as former Director of the Department of Morphological Pathology at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology and the National Institute of Forensic Medicine (Lisbon). He was also the President of a number of national evaluation and accreditation entities including: the FCT Scientific Council for Health and Life Sciences; the A3ES Assessment Committee for Medical Schools; and the Ministry of Health’s National Commission of Reference Centres. He was President of the Medical Sciences Society and the Portuguese Pathological Anatomy and Senology Societies. He is Académico Emérito from the Portuguese National Academy of Medicine, Académico Efetivo of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and Académico Correspondente of both the Royal National Medical Academy of Spain and the Royal Medicine Academy of Granada. He received the Diploma of Merit from the European Society of Pathology, the Gold Medal of Merit from the Portuguese Ministry of Health, and the Golden Medal from the Portuguese Medical Association.
Professor Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar (MD Harvard, PhD in English Columbia) at Columbia University in New York, where she teaches students, clinicians, and faculty about the languages of the humanities and of medicine, how to build cooperative relationships with patients, and how to use the imagination in the care of the sick. She founded the discipline of Narrative Medicine in 2000 and is now Chair of the recently created Department for Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia (2018). She has been honoured with many achievement awards from medical and literary societies, and she lectures and publishes extensively on Narrative Medicine topics, being a worldwide reference in this field.