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When it comes to matters of health, environment, and urban history, lessons of the past are often forgotten by Americans. However, in many ways, fears from American epidemics in the last 150 years have all become acute again with the COVID-19 pandemic. Working at the intersection of public health and urban/environmental history, architect Sara Jensen Carr investigates how shifts in the American urban landscape were driven by health concerns, and how these have led to this inflection point between living in the pandemic and a post-pandemic future. She's joined by urban and environmental planner Tim Beatley in this Medical Center Hour that addresses the "topography of wellness" in our urban public spaces even as we anticipate COVID-driven design changes.
History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library; Center for Design + Health, School of Architecture; and University of Virginia Press
We hear almost daily about the rapidly increasing rate of type 2 diabetes in the U.S. population. Many pronouncements are dire, proclaiming an "epidemic," and most make it sound as though this problem is relatively new-just three or four decades old. Yet almost 100 years ago a small group of U.S. health care professionals was already warning that diabetes was "a public health problem," fated to become worse if nothing was done soon. But what did they mean by this? Why had they grown concerned? And what measures did they recommend to try and reverse the upward trend in diabetes rates? In this Medical Center Hour, historian Arleen Tuchman asks what we can learn from history that might help us understand better how we are framing the diabetes "crisis" today, and why. How do cultural assumptions about diabetes, and about the particular populations believed to be most at risk, influence not only our understanding of this disease but also our efforts to gain control over it?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
In this 2023 testimony, Tiara Lassiter speaks about her experiences going to the Community Center in Lambert’s Point and the impact coal dust has on the drinking water supply for residents in Lambert’s Point. The testimony includes her recollections about her childhood friend’s grandmother in Lambert’s Point who developed lung cancer and lived with foul-smelling water in her home pipes. She urges the federal government to exert pressure on Norfolk Southern to remedy their violation of the Clean Water Act.
The first global wave of reform in modern medical education occurred early in the 20th century, following the Flexner report. The second wave came in the latter half of that same century, led by innovations in problem-based learning and community orientation. Recently, the Lancet Commission called for a third wave of reform to create transformative system-based medical education that is socially accountable. This may be a fine aspiration, but is it possible? How can we translate new understandings from neuroscience, sociology, and the sciences of learning to meet this aspiration? In doing so, may we also transform research on medical education from eminence-based to evidence-based medical education? How accountable are we prepared to be for the results of our efforts? And to whom?
In his Brodie Medical Education Award Lecture, Dr. Paul Worley draws on evidence from medical schools around the world to explore these critical questions and consider the challenge that social accountability brings to academic medicine's combined research, education, and service mission.
The Brodie Medical Education Award Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the Brodie Medical Education Award Committee, in association with the School of Medicine’s Medical Education Week, 29 February-4 March 2016.
The opioid epidemic is currently exacting a terrible toll on the health, lives, safety, and livelihood of persons and communities across Virginia, the Appalachian region, and, indeed, much of North America. What is being done to address this crisis at the levels of policy and practice in the Commonwealth of Virginia and in Charlottesville-Albemarle and environs? In this Medical Center Hour, the Honorable William A. Hazel Jr MD, Secretary of Health and Human Resources for the Commonwealth, discusses Virginia’s five-pronged approach to the epidemic and the impact of that approach to date. He is joined in this conversation by a primary care physician and community mental health professionals.
The Jessie Stewart Richardson Memorial Lecture of the School of Medicine
Co-presented with the Office of Quality and Performance Improvement, UVA Health System
Vernon Crump was born in 1929 in Portsmouth, Virginia, and has been a leader in civil rights work in the city since he was 25 years old. Crump’s roots in the area extend for generations. Crump’s great-grandfather, George Crump, was one of the founding members of the Zion Baptist Church, created by Black residents in 1865 just after the Civil War. In this oral history interview, Crump reflects on the city as it was transformed by WWII, recalling his mother’s experience serving white WWII sailors breakfast at the Portsmouth Shipyard, and his own memory delivering news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As a young child, Crump worked as a shoe shiner in a white barber shop. Crump reflects on his time playing football and going to school dances in segregated schools in the 1940s and 50s, and his long and successful battles fighting workplace discrimination throughout his career with the Department of Disposal. In the 1950s and 60s, Crump led major voter registration campaigns with the Civic League in Portsmouth, which registered Black voters and later helped to elect the first Black man and woman to the City Council, the first Black judge, and the first Black Clerk of Court in Portsmouth. This interview, conducted with Crump’s son, Vernon Crump III also present, also includes Crump’s reflections on police violence and rising sea levels in the city of Portsmouth.
The 1918 influenza pandemic was a global calamity that brought death on an unprecedented scale and intensified the devastating impact of World War I even as the armistice was signed in November 1918. Statistics tell the tale of this flu in one way, science tells it in another, but this Medical Center Hour—the third in a mini-series marking the pandemic's centenary—lets poetry speak to the human toll exacted by the 1918 H1N1 virus. In 1995, Virginia native and distinguished poet Ellen Bryant Voigt published Kyrie, a book-length sequence of poems in which small town speakers live through the harrowing epidemic and remember, defy, and mourn. Kyrie's fierce, moving poetry brings the global calamity home. In this Medical Center Hour, Voigt (on video) reads selections from Kyrie and discusses with poet Marianne Boruch the making and meaning of this American masterpiece.
Co-presented with the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, Historical Collections in the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, and Influenza! 1918-2018
