Biography

The Reverend Dr. Nathan Carlin is the Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston). Dr. Carlin holds the Samuel Karff Chair and the rank of Professor.

At McGovern Medical School, Dr. Carlin was elected as Chair of the Faculty Senate for 2018-2019, and has an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. At the UTHealth School of Dentistry, Dr. Carlin co-directs the Clinical Humanities Certificate Program for dental students.

Dr. Carlin’s teaching interests include pathography, physician-writing (especially the fiction of Samuel Shem), mental illness, death and dying, and other topics in medical humanities.

Dr. Carlin has published 9 books, and, in recent years, the focus of his writing has been oriented towards developing core texts for medical humanities. Some sample texts in this regard include Medical Humanities: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press); Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press); Contemporary-Physician Authors: Exploring the Insights of Doctors Who Write (Routledge); and Pathographies of Mental Illness (Cambridge University Press). Currently, Dr. Carlin is writing a monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press) on medicine and secularization.

Education

Bachelor of Arts
Westminster College
Master of Divinity
Princeton Theological Seminary
Master of Arts
Rice University
Doctor of Philosophy
Rice University

Areas of Interest

Research Interests

Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Pastoral Theology
Psychology of Religion

Publications

Visit the PubMed profile page

  • Carlin, N. (Ed.) (2021). Contemporary physician-authors: Exploring the insights of doctors who write. Routledge.
  • Carlin, N. (2020). Correlating bioethics and theology. American Journal of Bioethics, 20(12).
  • Carlin, N. (2015). Doctors and Dr. Seuss: Restoring the patient’s voice. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 24(1), 113-119.
  • Cole, T. R., Carlin, N., & Carson, R. A. (2014). Medical humanities: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
  • Carlin, N. (2014). Religious mourning: Reversals and restorations in psychological portraits of religious leaders. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
  • Cole, T. R., & Carlin, N. (2009). The suffering of physicians. The Lancet, 374(9699), 1414-1415.