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Southern Appalachia often provides a folksy backstory to our national mythology—a tale of coal miners, moonshining, bluegrass, and ballads. But Appalachia is a real place that figures fundamentally in this country's heritage and destiny.
Its rugged mountains are rich in natural resources while its remote communities are home to some of the nation's most fiercely proud people and most persistent poverty. This region has endowed American culture—and the University of Virginia—with a wealth of gifts and innovations but itself faces staggering difficulties. Embracing Appalachia is challenging, especially now, as the coal industry disappears and crises of poor health, environmental degradation, and poverty deepen.
This Medical Center Hour with West Virginia coalfields native David Gordon probes our particular connections to Appalachia and how the enduring tragedy of this place is a “canary in the coalmine” for the rest of our nation.
Is "healthy Appalachia" possible? What will it take? What must we do?
Co-presented with the Center for Global Health, Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures (Global South Initiative), Department of Public Health Sciences, and Healthy Appalachia Institute
In this Medical Center Hour, award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian explores the human and global health implications of India’s ravaged environmental landscape. Her new book, A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, investigates five environmental crises by profiling ordinary people and micro-enterprises determined to guide India and its burgeoning population into a healthier future. An organic farmer revives dead land; villagers resuscitate a river run dry; cook-stove designers seek a smokeless fire; biologists bring vultures back from the brink of extinction; and, in one of India’s poorest states, a bold young woman teaches adolescent girls the fundamentals of sexual health. In these individual stories resides hope for a nation and its people and the potential for a sustainable and more prosperous world.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture/Exploring the Global South
Co-presented with the Center for Global Health, Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures (Global South Initiative), Department of Public Health Sciences, and Virginia Quarterly Review
Andreas Vesalius, long hailed as "the father of modern anatomy," is slipping into oblivion. The likes of Gray's Anatomy (the book), Netter's Atlas, plasticized dissected bodies, and online visible human specimens having eclipsed his splendidly illustrated book, On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), as our definitive anatomy text. Vesalius's recent 500th birthday anniversary gives us a chance not only to celebrate this Renaissance genius, but also to consider how his accomplishments in the study of human anatomy helped medicine to become "modern."
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
When academic medicine in the U.S. begins to reflect the remarkable diversity of the population it serves, we can potentially start narrowing critical gaps in cultural knowledge, the provision of health care, and the education and advancement of future physicians. Invoking the time-honored art of quilt-making as a metaphor, Dr. Wendi Wills El-Amin will engage the audience at this Medical Center Hour in exploring the urgent issue of minority diversity in academic medicine, including the opportunities that currently exist to craft new patterns and other opportunities we need to create in order to increase minority presence and engagement throughout academic medicine. UVA School of Medicine Associate Dean for Diversity Dr. Greg Townsend will offer a response.
Co-presented with the Office for Diversity, School of Medicine
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Early in her own training in psychology a decade ago, Casey Schwartz discovered that contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis are entangled in a conflict almost as old as the disciplines themselves. Many neuroscientists, if they think about psychoanalysis at all, view it as outdated, arbitrary, and subjective, while many psychoanalysts decry neuroscience as lacking the true texture of human experience. Yet some are now fighting passionately to bring the two fields together, including Mark Solms, a South African psychoanalyst, neuropsychologist, dream researcher, and towering presence in the effort to grow the hybrid discipline that he himself calls neuropsychoanalysis. Ms. Schwartz has written this story in her new book, In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. In this Medical Center Hour, she tracks and interprets the ongoing struggle to define what we mean by the mind, the brain, and everything in between.
History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences
Danny Quirk is a young artist specializing in photorealistic watercolors, painting what the camera cannot capture. Much of his work illustrates the intricacies of human anatomy. On canvas, he paints figures in classic poses (sometimes á la Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius) in striking chiaroscuro lighting. But, more dramatically, he also paints on living subjects, representing on the body's surface the anatomical structures that lie beneath. In this Medical Center Hour, Danny Quirk talks about "dissecting" with a paintbrush—and while he's talking, he'll complete an anatomical drawing on a student volunteer.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
Dying in America is very different now from half a century ago. Before World War II, death usually occurred at home, often with no medical intervention. But with the bioscientific and medical advances that began in the 1950's, death became medicalized. In hospitals, it became possible to extend life. Often, patients were cured who would otherwise have died, but many endured protracted deaths in which suffering from treatment was worse than suffering from their fatal illness. Through the last decades of the 20th century, the medical and legal professions, medical ethicists, and the public began to consider ways to limit treatment, even to hasten death. It became generally accepted that all patients have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. Now, five U.S. states recognize physician-assisted suicide.
In this Medical center hour, physician and former New England Journal of Medicine editor-in-chief Marcia Angell traces the history of these changes, then inquires into where we stand now on dying--and where we go from here.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
Columbine. Virginia Tech. Ft. Hood. Huntsville. Tucson. Aurora. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Charleston. Roseburg. Gun violence, including a relentless raft of mass shootings, is epidemic today in the U.S., threatening individual safety and public health and wellbeing. The grim tally for 2015, says the Washington Post, is 294 mass shootings in 274 days. Many shooters are said to have undiagnosed or undertreated mental illness in their background.
How does psychopathology contribute to violent behavior, particularly involving firearms, over a person's life course and in the social environment? How accurate and useful are clinicians’ predictions of violence in their patients? What is an appropriate role for clinicians as “gun gatekeepers” and for mental health services generally, as part of a public-health solution to gun violence? This Medical Center Hour reviews research related to these urgent questions and explores implications for clinicians and other mental-health stakeholders.
Co-presented with the Institute for Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and the School of Law, UVA
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
When documentary filmmaker Kathy Leichter moved back into her childhood home after her mother's suicide, she discovered a hidden box of audiotapes. Sixteen years passed before she had the courage to delve into this trove, but there she unearthed what her mother had recorded about every aspect of her life--from the joys and challenges of her marriage to a state senator to her son's estrangement , as well as the highs and lows of living with bipolar disorder. Here one day is Ms. Leichter's emotionally candid film about a woman coping with mental illness, her family relationships, and the ripple effects of her suicide on those she loved. In this Medical center hour, Ms. Leichter offers her extraordinary award-winning film, speaks about the transformative nature of story, and shows how Here one day is helping to dissolve mental health stigma and to educate and support persons and families in communities and educational institutions across the country.
Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a Great Society, an America free from poverty and racial injustice and full of equality of opportunity and social mobility for all. Many legislative planks of his Great society platform--civil and voting rights, educational opportunity, fair housing practices, urban planning, mass transit, and health care --represent what we today consider "social determinants of health." This Medical center hour with bioethicist Erika Blacksher reviews how Americans are faring today in relation to key aspirations of LBJ's Great Society, especially those that bear on health. Americans generally live shorter, less healthy lives than their counterparts in peer nations, and within the U.S. health varies dramatically among social and economic groups and from region to region. What ethical concerns are raised by significant health disparities? Are such disparities unjust, as many in public health assume? If so, what are our responsibilites, and what ethical limits might constrain our pursuit of a more equitable distribution of health?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life
