Healing Body & Soul — A Christian Holistic Program

Vitae Formation

Mens sana in corpore sano, anima in Christo.

Christian holistic health grounded in beauty, truth, and the dignity of the human person.

A program for every family. Healing body and soul, classical and Christian, from the Vitae clinic to the Virtualis classroom.

Vitae is a Christian program that unites a K–12 health formation curriculum with a Christian telemedicine practice — education, virtue, and medical care under one roof. Founded and led by Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD, available to Virtualis families through our partnership with Vitae Catholica.

Ready for 2026–27
Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD, Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, author of Vitae Formation
Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD · Author of Vitae Formation
Founded by a PhD clinician ✝ Curriculum + clinic, one program ✝ Live telehealth today
Movement I — The Curator's Note

A Christian School of Health

Vitae is a Christian program that unites a K–12 health formation curriculum with a live Christian telemedicine practice, under the direction of Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD. Education, virtue, and medical care under one roof — built on the Christian conviction that the body is a temple, not a machine. Vitae stands in the lineage of the Schola Medica Salernitana and the University of Padua, the two Christian schools that first taught the West to read the human body as a moral and theological object.

Movement II — The Author

Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD

A Pediatric Nurse Practitioner with a doctorate in nursing, two decades of clinical experience, and the mother of two. She does not write health curriculum at a distance — she writes what she already practices at the bedside every week.

Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD holding a newborn patient
Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD — at the bedside, where Vitae is written

Dana has spent two decades caring for children and counseling their parents. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing, board certification as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (PNP-BC), and she is the mother of two. She is the founder and clinical director of Vitae — the Christian program that unites a K–12 health formation curriculum with a live Christian telemedicine practice. She built Vitae out of the conviction that health is not a subject to be studied alongside a faith, but an art that a Christian parent owes her child.

The clinical side of Vitae is already open and seeing patients. The K–12 formation curriculum is ready for 2026–27. When the curriculum launches, it will join the live clinic as the second half of the same Vitae program — so a question raised in the textbook can be followed up with a real appointment the same week, with the same clinician who wrote the chapter. That continuity between classroom and clinic is what makes Vitae a Christian program rather than a curriculum bolted onto a school.

  • PhD, Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing
  • RN, Registered Nurse
  • PNP-BC, Pediatric Nurse Practitioner
  • Two decades in practice
  • Mother of two
  • Co-founder, Vitae Catholica

“I write this curriculum for my own children first, and then for yours. Every lesson is something I would want a son or a daughter of mine to know before they leave my house.”

Dana Rodriguez

Author, Vitae Formation · Co-founder, Vitae Catholica

Movement III — The Lineage

Four Witnesses We Stand Behind

Vitae does not invent a new tradition of Christian health. It recovers one that is nearly a thousand years old and largely forgotten. These four are its principal witnesses.

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias illumination
XII Century

Hildegard of Bingen

Doctor Ecclesiae

Benedictine abbess, composer, preacher, and physician. Her Causae et Curae is among the first Christian manuals to treat medicine as a branch of moral theology — body, soul, and sacraments in one book.

Trota of Salerno, medieval manuscript illumination
XII Century

Trota of Salerno

Mulier Sapiens

The first named woman physician of the Schola Medica Salernitana. Her Trotula corpus taught Europe how to care for mothers and children for four centuries.

Tacuinum Sanitatis medieval manuscript
XIV Century

Tacuinum Sanitatis

Regimen Vitae

A Christian-Latin regimen of daily health — bread, sleep, air, work, prayer — illuminated in the style of a book of hours. Ordinary life as the material of sanctification.

Portrait of Saint John Paul II
XX Century

St. John Paul II

Doctor Corporis

His Theology of the Body — 129 Wednesday catecheses — is the philosophical spine of Vitae Formation. Embodiment as a language through which God speaks.

Movement IV — Scripture

The Body as a Temple

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
— 1 Corinthians 6:19–20
Movement V — The Third Leg of the Liberal Arts

The Quintivium

The Trivium gives us the arts of truth. The Quadrivium gives us the arts of beauty. The Quintivium — authored here at Virtualis — gives us the arts of goodness: five liberal arts of the whole human person, extending the medieval seven into a complete classical Christian education.

Quintivium I: Wonderfully Made — cover of the first volume of the Quintivium textbook series (opens in new tab)
Quintivium I — Wonderfully Made. The first volume of the K–12 Quintivium series. Click the cover to read the curator's remarks and open a sample of the book.
Open the Sample PDF → (opens in new tab)

The Five Arts of the Human Person

Each art is a way of knowing the human being. Each is a required thread across the entire K–12 series. Every week of every year reaches into all five.

Tacuinum Sanitatis daily health illumination
I ΣΩΜΑ · Soma

Body

The art of the flesh: anatomy, physiology, nutrition, movement, sleep, sickness, and healing. The eleven systems of the human body walked once at each grade level across K–12 — each pass deeper than the last.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653)
II ΝΟΥΣ · Nous

Mind

The art of the intellect: how the Christian knows the body. Empiricism, phenomenology, philosophy of science, the hylomorphic unity of body and soul, nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.

Giotto, Justitia (c. 1305) Scrovegni Chapel
III ΗΘΟΣ · Êthos

Ethics

The art of virtue: what the body is for. Cardinal and theological virtues, the acquired and infused life, conscience, chastity, prudence, temperance, and the moral weight of every physical choice.

St. John Paul II
IV ΘΕΟΣ · Theos

Theology

The art of the body as sign: imago Dei, the Incarnation, the sacraments as bodily acts, the Resurrection of the flesh, John Paul II's Theology of the Body as the organizing grammar.

Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government (1338-39, Siena)
V ΠΟΛΙΣ · Polis

Politics

The art of the common body: family, school, parish, city. How embodied persons organize their common life well. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Leo XIII, the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity.

The K–12 Argument

One volume per grade across the full K–12 arc. Each volume walks the eleven systems of the human body in all five arts, at the altitude appropriate to the student. A kindergartener learns to wash her hands reverently. A senior defends an ethical position on end-of-life care. The thread between them is unbroken.

The Quintivium

Trivium · Quadrivium · QuintiviumThree, four, five — the twelve liberal arts of the Christian person

For two thousand years, classical Christian education has been built on seven liberal arts: the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). The Quintivium is our recovery of a missing leg: the five arts by which a Christian knows the human person. Not seven arts, but twelve.

When the Quintivium launches, Vitae Formation will be a required core subject at Virtualis — equal in stature to Math, English Language Arts, Science, and History in every student's weekly schedule. Not a supplement. Not an elective. The third leg of the stool.

Movement VI — The Architecture

How Vitae Is Built

Vitae is three axes woven into a single K–12 sequence. Take any week of any grade and all three are present at once.

Axis I

Eleven Systems

The Subject Axis

Each year walks the student through the eleven major systems of the human body — skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, nervous, endocrine, immune, integumentary, reproductive, urinary — at an age-appropriate depth. The full K–12 arc returns to each system at progressively deeper levels.

Axis II

Five Arts

The Wisdom Axis

Every week reaches into all five arts of the Quintivium: Body · Mind · Ethics · Theology · Politics. Anatomy becomes virtue, virtue becomes prayer, prayer becomes political conviction, conviction becomes a way of life.

Axis III

Twelve Years

The Growth Axis

The K–12 arc is one single argument about what a Christian human being is. A kindergartener learns to kneel. A senior defends an ethical position on end-of-life care. The thread between them is unbroken by a single class.

Movement VII — The Clinic Behind the Curriculum

Available Now — The Vitae Clinic

Vitae is two halves of one program: a K–12 health formation curriculum (in active authoring) and a live Christian telemedicine practice. The clinical half is already open and accepting families today.

The anatomical theatre of the University of Padua, built 1594 — historical diorama
The Anatomy Theatre at Padua — where the Christian West learned to read the body reverently

Vitae Health is a Christian telehealth practice led by Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD. Families can book wellness consultations, developmental screenings, and parent coaching today — while the Vitae Formation curriculum prepares for its 2026–27 launch.

This is how Vitae is different: the founder is the clinician, the clinician is the curriculum author, and the curriculum and the clinic are run by the same hands. A parent reading a chapter on adolescent development can call the woman who wrote it — and book an appointment with her.

Visit vitaehealth.org →

Movement VIII — A Poem at the Heart

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ · c. 1877

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As túmbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Hopkins is the patron poet of Vitae because he understood, before the word phenomenology existed, that every creature is a sign — and that to be a body is to speak God's name by being oneself.

Movement IX — Questions

Frequently Asked

What is Vitae Formation, in one sentence?+
Vitae is a Christian program that integrates a K–12 health formation curriculum (published by Vitae Catholica, an Arizona 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit) with a live Christian telemedicine practice (operated by Vitae Health, a DBA of Rodriguez Corporation). Both are led by Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD. The clinic is open today; the curriculum is ready for 2026–27.
What is the Quintivium?+
The Quintivium is the K–12 textbook series that is Vitae Formation. It extends the classical Trivium (three arts) and Quadrivium (four arts) with five more — Body, Mind, Ethics, Theology, and Politics. One volume per grade, authored by Zeus Rodriguez and Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD. When complete, it will be the required core text of Vitae Formation at Virtualis.
When will it be available?+
The clinical half of Vitae is available now — book a virtual consultation with Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD at vitaehealth.org. The K–12 health formation curriculum is ready for 2026–27. When it launches, it will join the clinic as the second half of the same Vitae program. Virtualis families enrolled today already have access to the Vitae clinic through our partnership.
Why call it a “Schola Medica”?+
Because that is what it is. The Schola Medica Salernitana (founded in the eleventh century) and the University of Padua (where Vesalius dissected the body in the sixteenth century) were the two Christian schools that taught the West to read the human body reverently — as a moral and theological object rather than a mere machine. Vitae stands consciously in that lineage.
Who is Dr. Dana Rodriguez, PhD?+
Dana is a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (PNP-BC) with a PhD in Nursing, two decades of clinical experience, and a mother of two. She is the founder and clinical director of Vitae — she runs the live telemedicine practice today and is the author of the Vitae K–12 health formation curriculum. She is not a theorist writing at a distance; she is a clinician writing what she already practices at the bedside.
How is this different from a normal health class?+
A normal health class teaches nutrition, exercise, and sex education as three separate topics over a few weeks and then disappears. Vitae Formation teaches the eleven systems of the body, the five liberal arts of the person, and the full K–12 arc of a student's growth as a single argument about what a Christian human being is. Every week reaches into anatomy, ethics, theology, movement, and prayer at once.
Does Vitae offer telehealth services today?+
Yes. While the formal curriculum prepares for 2026–27 launch, Vitae Health is a Christian telehealth practice that is open and accepting patients right now. Wellness consultations, developmental screenings, and parent coaching are all available to Virtualis families today.
Can I read a sample of the first Quintivium volume?+
Yes. Click here to open the sample PDF of Quintivium I: Wonderfully Made (opens in new tab) — the first volume of the K–12 series. You can also click the book cover above in Movement V.

Be the First to See Vitae

Enroll today for the 2026–27 school year, or request information about the Vitae Formation curriculum and the Quintivium textbook series. Families on our formation list will receive previews of the books as they are released.

Enroll for 2026–2027 Info