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Lucy Kalanithi is many things. Physician. Professor. Writer, and speaker. Mother. Widow. She was married for nine years to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, the illness that claimed his life in 2015 at age thirty-seven. As he struggled, suffered, and worried, Paul wrote. His memoir—When Breath Becomes Air, for which Lucy wrote the epilogue—became a bestseller after it was published in 2016.
In this Medical Center Hour, which is also the School of Nursing's annual Bice Memorial Lecture, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi talks with UVA Nursing Professor Ken White about the Kalanithis' challenging journey to the end of Paul's life and how Paul and Lucy did not avoid suffering but, rather, leaned into it and created meaning from it.
The Zula Mae Baber Bice Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the School of Nursing
The year 2018 marks the centennial of the "Spanish" influenza pandemic, the world's deadliest event, killing at least 50 million persons worldwide. This pandemic's sudden emergence and high fatality are stark reminders of the threat influenza has posed to human health and society for more than a millennium. Unusual features of the 1918-1919 outbreak, such as the age-specific mortality pattern and unexpectedly high frequency of severe and fatal pneumonias, are still not fully understood. But the recent sequencing and reconstruction of the 1918 virus—work accomplished by NIH scientist Jeffery Taubenberger and colleagues—have yielded answers to crucial questions about the virus's origin and pathogenicity. In this Hayden-Farr Lecture at Medical Center Hour, Dr. Taubenberger summarizes key findings, considers yet-to-be answered questions about the 1918 influenza, and looks ahead to 21st century public health preparedness and the need to optimize preventive vaccines and vaccination strategies.
The Hayden-Farr Lecture in Epidemiology and Virology/Medical Grand Rounds/History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, Historical Collections in the Health Sciences Library, and Influenza! 1918-2018
This Richardson Memorial Lecture's origins are the hospital death of infant Lola Jayden Fitch and her family's journey to evoke change. The hour is anchored in the stories of Lola's parents--her mother, who questioned her intuition, and her father, who chose to continue working in the hospital where Lola's death occurred--and in a review of medical staff communication errors that tragically affected Lola's care.
How can we prevent communication breakdowns, improve teamwork, and foster greater transparency and true partnership with families to make health care better and safer, especially for the most vulnerable patients? How can Lola's Song and similar stories--those of patients, families, health professionals, and others--help us to accomplish this important work?
www.lolassong.com
The Jessie Stewart Richardson Memorial Lecture of the School of Medicine
Co-presented with the Office of Quality and Performance Improvement, UVA Health System
What if there were a vaccine that could prevent cancer? The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, available since 2006, does this, guarding against cancers caused by this ubiquitous virus. This Medical Center Hour explores the sociopolitical context of HPV vaccination in Virginia and beyond. Using clips from a powerful documentary film, Someone You Love: The HPV Epidemic (2014), an expert panel of UVA researchers, clinicians, and oncologists discusses the crucial importance of HPV vaccination--for boys as well as girls--and the concerns that still limit its use.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Cancer Center, UVA
Many personal, social, organizational, and regulatory factors in health care today contribute to clinicians experiencing burnout, a chronic stress syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of inadequacy. When severe, these symptoms are often accompanied and exacerbated by depression—and sometimes lead to suicide. In this combined Medical Center Hour and Medical Grand Rounds, Dean Gianakos MD FACP will not teach techniques to fortify personal resilience in the face of incipient burnout or offer strategies to reduce the inefficiencies of practice. Rather, using poems and stories, he will open a dialogue on how health professionals can emotionally support one another, initiate crucial conversations, and reduce the isolation that too often characterizes medical practice.
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
Thirty years ago, the medical school at East Carolina University created a readers' theater program in which short stories about medicine were adapted as theatrical scripts. Medical students performed a story by reading it aloud, then actors and audience--often a community group--together discussed the drama and the ethical and social issues it raised. These plays and post-performance discussions enlivened and changed how future physicians and audiences--prospective patients all--approached and learned from one another.
The best way to learn about medical readers' theater? Just do it. In this Medical Center Hour, UVA medical student actors present a dramatic reading of physician-poet William Carlos Williams's 1938 short story, "A Face of Stone." Following the performance, the audience joins in, as everyone responds to and discusses the play and the ethical, social, and cultural concerns it explores.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Sloane Society for Medical Humanities, UVA
In June 2018, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a budget bill that gives 400,000 low-income Virginians access to government health insurance through Medicaid. This action marked an upbeat, bipartisan close to a bitter, four-year battle in the General Assembly. An Affordable Care Act option, Medicaid expansion makes additional low-income persons in participating states eligible for care that is funded chiefly with federal dollars. Virginia’s decision to join 32 other participating states hinged on a legislative compromise with Republicans that imposes work requirements on Medicaid recipients. While a few other states have taken similar positions, debate about work requirements continues in government, policy circles, and the courts. This Medical Center Hour looks at Medicaid expansion in Virginia—to be implemented in January 2019—from policy, political, and health care perspectives, with a focus on what it means locally, in Charlottesville and Central Virginia.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Martina Scholtens worked as a physician at Bridge Refugee Clinic in Vancouver for ten years, caring for patients from around the world. Her book about this work, Your Heart is the Size of Your Fist, is a creative nonfiction account of one Iraqi family’s first year in Canada from her perspective as their doctor. In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Scholtens explores the physician writer’s obligation to patient, profession, and society and inquires into the legitimization of patient suffering, the concept of medical maternalism, and the challenges of advocacy.
The Moore Lecture of the School of Medicine/Medical Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Generalist Scholars Program and the Department of Medicine, and offered in conjunction with Primary Care Week at UVA
The influenza pandemic of 1918 was the most powerful pandemic disease in human history, emerging out of the worst-case scenario of an airborne virus mutating to an extremely lethal form amid crowded conditions of military training camps and battlefields. This deadly influenza exploded from the Western Front of World War I to circle the globe and kill at least 50 million people worldwide within 18 months. To open UVA’s centennial commemoration of the 1918 pandemic, historian Carol Byerly highlights the U.S. Army’s experience with influenza at home and abroad in the context of the historic relation between disease and war. What can we learn from 1918 even as we anticipate and fear future pandemics?
A History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, School of Nursing; Historical Collections in the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library; and Influenza! 1918-2018
We hear much these days about the widening gap in America between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. Inequality is all around us, and it exacts a serious toll on health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. Indeed, there is a 35-year difference in life expectancy between America's wealthiest (and healthiest) and poorest (and sickest) neighborhoods.
Internist David Ansell MD has worked for four decades in hospitals serving Chicago's poorest communities. While he's witnessed first-hand the structural violence—racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination—responsible for the "death gap," he argues that geography need not be destiny. In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Ansell outlines how we can address this national health crisis and act to remedy the circumstances that rob many Americans of their dignity and their lives.
Co-presented with Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society, UVA chapter