Word: christensen
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...unit of New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Stubs is clearly no ordinary doctor. To those who witness his offbeat bedside manner, Stubs' true trade is obvious. He's a clown, a founding member of the one-ring Big Apple Circus. But to Stubs, a.k.a. Michael Christensen, working with young hospital patients is serious business...
...Since Christensen, 43, started the Clown Care Unit at Babies Hospital four years ago, the project has grown to involve 25 trained clowns who make rounds at eight New York City hospitals. Two or three days a week, bands of these performers, dressed in mock hospital garb and bearing such names as Dr. Comfort, Dr. EBDBD and Disorderly Gordoon, visit ailing children and their families. The clowns' purpose: to alleviate the fear and confusion of hospital stays and provide bright moments with humorous routines, such as "drawing blood" -- with red crayons -- and giving funny-bone examinations. Christensen has found...
...would a clown give up the big top for hospital rounds? To Christensen, the C.C.U. is more than work; it's a calling. "This project came out of an unconscious place in myself," he explains. "After going through those feelings of loss and of grief around my brother's death five years ago, this gave me a feeling of celebration and joy, of healing after his loss. Call it love and caring, God, a higher consciousness -- whatever -- I want to give my life to that...
Clown Care got its start in 1986, when an official at Babies Hospital asked if Big Apple Circus clowns would entertain at a gathering for patients and their families. Christensen and fellow clown Jeff Gordon obliged, performing a 20-minute parody of hospital personnel, food and procedures. Patients and staff alike roared with laughter, especially when the clowns coaxed the otherwise formal chief surgeon into participating in a silly bell-ringing routine. The session, says Christensen, was "the most fulfilling 20 minutes of my professional career, and it was from that experience that the C.C.U. plan took root...
...School make its New Pathways program--a case-based system of instruction initiated as a 24-student experimental project four years ago--the foundation of its curriculum. The School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government also use the case method in some of their courses, says Christensen...