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Deborah Salem Smith's acclaimed play Love alone is the story of what happens after a routine medical procedure goes tragically wrong. A medical malpractice lawsuit ensues, and the lives of both the patient's family and the doctor charged with her care are transformed. The play tracks the fallout in both homes. It is a portrait of how each family grieves and heals. These questions were central in the construction of the plot: Is forgiveness a single act or a daily act? Is it unconditional? Who has the right to forgive? Does forgiveness require remorse or an apology by the offender? Do lawsuits empower victims and thus aid the grieving process, or do they disrupt grieving? Does proving negligence make a victim more prepared to forgive? What does a lawsuit mean for the doctor sued, and for his or her personal journey of recovering from the unexpected death of a patient? George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession." What are the implications and burdens of such faith? This Medical Center Hour explores Love Alone with the playwright and local actors but also with a physician who has written on doctors' efforts to deal with their own mistakes.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Dr. Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley speaks about the tensions of implementing urban nature projects. Wolch challenges us to think carefully about the many different and often marginalized interests (people and animals) that must be taken into account, and the potential “collisions” she sees in the movement.
Dr. Stephen Kellert spoke to participants at the Biophilic Cities Launch about the ethical and value changes that need to occur to achieve biophilic design in cities. He argued for a theory of cities (using his own city of New Haven as an example) that explains location, livability and future thriving based on natural features and conditions.
Dr. Romero shares insights regarding the increasingly important partnership of public health and primary care and the critical need for a strong, patient-centered primary care framework to improve health outcomes.
Co-presented with the Generalist Scholars Program and the Department of Public Health Sciences, UVA, in observance at UVA of Primary Care Week
With availability of medical interventions like cochlear implants to treat deafness, health professionals caring for deaf persons or helping families make reproductive choices about deafness (as in prenatal genetic screening) tend to work from biomedical rather than cultural understandings of deafness. Deaf Americans have produced a fascinating literary corpus over the last 200 years, both writing in English and creating stories and poems in American Sign Language. Similarly, the work of deaf visual artists illustrates powerfully how deafness may be construed as visual and conceptual gain rather than as hearing loss. These expressions of deaf culture also respond to the pathologization and medicalization of deafness in our society, resist the majority's assumptions and norms, and argue for the value of the deaf community and sign.
This Medical center hour explores deaf literature and visual art to suggest that a deeper understanding of deaf culture can help health professionals to provide better care and counsel, medically and ethically speaking, to deaf patients and their families.
Co-presented with the Department of English and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, UVA
There's much mythology surrounding eating disorders. Myth: these are time-imited illnesses that resolve when a woman leaves adolescence. Myth: only women experience eating disorders. In a society that reveres bodily thinness and now also celebrates the extremely "fit" body, at once lean and overtly muscular, an estimated 25 to 30 million Americans currently suffer from an eating disorder. Most eating disorders look nothing like the stereotypes suggested by sensational media coverage. The afflicted include men and women of all ages and all ethnicities. And so alongside this country's well-publicized obesity epidemic rages another, quite invisible epidemic of eating disorders. This Medical Center Hour addresses eating disorders and related questions from three perspectives. Speakers include a UVA student in recovery, a parent and national advocate, and the coordinator of the prevention program at UVA's Women's Center. What role does family play in eating disorders? How as health professionals do we ensure that patients get the best treatment? What treatments are most effective? How can we, health professionals and laypersons alike, best support someone who is suffering? What resources are available at UVA and how do we get involved?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Women's Center, UVA
Physician-author Lisa Sanders, who writes the popular "Diagnosis" column in The New York Times Magazine and "Think Like a Doctor" blog for the New York Times, probes the crucial exchanges between doctor and patient that are at the heart of every medical mystery and its solution.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in Medical Humanities
Emily Levine does for science what Jon Stewart does for news: she critiques it, she makes it relevant, she makes it funny. She brings her experiences as a patient in search of a diagnosis and a curative path to physical health and notes that in order to regain metaphysical health, she had to enter a universe of randomness, uncertainty, and turbulence. She reasons that only quantum physics and chaos theory can make sense of this new universe, and possibly of medicine today.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
On 13 June 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down patents on the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA) genes. One company, Utah-based Myriad Genetics, claimed ownership of those genes and both marketed and processed the test for them. Myriad now controls the genetic data of all the persons tested for BRCA.
In the wake of the 9-0 ruling against Myriad, there's considerable debate about who owns this genetic information and who should control it. Should it be held by a private company or in a commons? Should control rest with the BRCA+ community? "Free the Data," a new grass-roots campaign, brings voices of BRCA+ individuals and biomedical investigators alike into this debate. In this Medical Center Hour, documentary filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, together with law and medical experts from UVA, discuss what's at stake in freeing the data.
Co-presented with the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and the Cancer Center's Breast Care Program, UVA
The Hollingsworth Lecture in Practical Ethics
This illustrated lecture traces the life and work of Sydney architect Harry Seidler (1923-2006), his key role in bringing Modernism and Bauhaus principles to Australia, identifies his distinctive hand, and explores long-lasting creative collaborations with leading visionaries of the 20th century, including with architects Marcel Breuer and Oscar Niemeyer; artists Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Norman Carlberg, Charles Perry, Frank Stella, and Lin Utzon; engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, photographer Max Dupain, and developer Dick Dusseldorp, founder of Lend Lease Corporation. In almost sixty years, Seidler has realized over 120 of his designs—from houses to mixed-use multi-story towers and prominent government commissions—all over Australia, as well as in Austria, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, and Hong Kong.
Apart from the architect’s creative achievements, the lecture will reveal a story of Seidler’s life, a fascinating journey from his motherland of Austria to England, Canada, the United States, Brazil, and finally, to Australia, where he settled in 1948, eventually becoming the country’s most accomplished architect. Among projects to be discussed: Rose Seidler House (1950), Harry and Penelope Seidler House (1967), and Australia Square (1967) in Sydney; Edmund Barton Building (Canberra, 1974), Australian Embassy (Paris, 1977), Hong Kong Club (HK, 1984), Shell Headquarters (Melbourne, 1989) and residential complex Wohnpark Neue Donau (Vienna, 1998).