Date
Monday
November 2nd, 2026
Location
Fondazione Sasso Corbaro,
Via Lugano 4A, Bellinzona
Time
6.30 PM
General information
Free entry, booking recommended
A small reception will follow after the event
What can literature teach medicine about how to see, listen, and remain attentive to another person?
Can reading help us understand illness not only as a clinical condition, but as a lived experience shaped by relationships, social circumstances, suffering, fear,
and mortality?
Taking Iona Heath’s John Berger: Ways of Learning as its point of departure, this conversation explores the fertile ground between literature and medicine. For more than fifty years, Heath has read John Berger’s work; for nearly twenty, she shared with him a friendship and correspondence that profoundly influenced her practice as a general practitioner in inner-city London. His writing opened new ways of thinking about attention, responsibility, justice, listening, and care.
In dialogue with journalist, essayist, and translator Maria Nadotti, the Italian editor and translator of Berger’s work, Heath will reflect on what literature can bring to clinical practice, and on how stories, words, and images can transform the way we encounter illness and those who live through it.
An evening about a book, but above all about the ways in which reading can change how we see, listen, and care.
Iona Heath
General practioner for over thirty-five years at the Caversham Group Practice of Kentish Tow in London. She chaired the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Journal, to which she contributed regularly and served as President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She studied the influence of the medical-industrial complex and the commercialization of medicine. She is the author of several books, including The Mystery of General Practice (1995), Matter of Life and Death (2008), and In Its Own Image: Medicine and the Market (2016).
Maria Nadotti
Journalist, essayist, and translator. Among her books are Silenzio = Morte. Gli USA nel tempo dell’AIDS (1994), Sesso & Genere (1996, 2022), and Necrologhi. Pamphlet sull’arte di consumare (2015). She is also the editor and translator of the work of John Berger, to whom she dedicated the 2021 podcast For John B. As early as the 1990s, she introduced the work of bell hooks to Italy, editing and translating key texts. She is the author of two medium-length films: In Praise of Constancy (2006) and Under Truce, Gaza (2009). Together with the Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr, she wrote Endless Trauma (Feltrinelli, 2026).
Informazioni
This event is promoted in collaboration with
Casa della Letteratura per la Svizzera Italiana,
Il Pensiero Scientifico Editore