Could not complete log in. Possible causes and solutions are:
Cookies are not set, which might happen if you've never visited this website before.
Please open https://avalon.lib.virginia.edu/ in a new window, then come back and refresh this page.
An ad blocker is preventing successful login.
Please disable ad blockers for this site then refresh this page.
Amid the current opioid epidemic in the U.S., discourse around addicts and addiction can be overwhelmingly negative, pessimistic, and hopeless, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Even in health care, negativity about addiction prevails, making it more challenging for clinicians and organizations to respond with appropriate care, services, and resources. The toll of addiction is staggering. But while statistical and fiscal analyses of the national epidemic can also overwhelm and add to the negativity, might we gain a different view of addiction by accessing the particular experience of it, as it affects individuals and also their families? To know better what is at stake and how to foster recovery, this Medical Center Hour turns to poets Kate Daniels and Owen Lewis for their response to addiction when it strikes close to heart and home. How can writing serve to access the lived experience of addiction—in this case, addiction inside the family circle—and how might writing aid in recovery, for everyone involved?
Questions about transplant candidate suitability and priority made headlines earlier this year, when 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan's parents went to court (and to the media) to request that their daughter, dying of cystic fibrosis, be placed on the eligibility list for a lung transplant. The court's decision, UNOS's followup (Sarah got a new, fictitious birthdate to qualify to receive adult lungs), and Sarah's two double-lung procedures galvanized the transplant community, bioethicists, policymakers, and the public alike.
Even as efforts continue to increase the organ supply, what should we do about our allocation systems? In this Medical Center Hour, three experts engage the medical, legal, and ethical questions raised by the Sarah Murnaghan case.
Co-presented with the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Many doctors have also been celebrated writers, from Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, and William Carlos Williams to Perri Klass, Atul Gawande, and Maxim Osipov. The reading public (including other doctors) eagerly devours what doctors write, not least in hopes of glimpsing what makes physicians tick, as persons, as healers. But why do doctors write? In this Medical Center Hour, three of UVA's own accomplished physician writers respond, in their own inimitable words.
An Ellis C. Moore Memorial Lecture
Theresa Brown became a nurse-who-writes quite accidentally: she had a bad experience at work, wrote it down, and sent what she'd written to the New York Times. To her surprise, the newspaper published it, to great acclaim. From that column came the contract for Ms. Brown's first book, Critical Care, and she also began writing regularly for the Times, proud to have this chance to give voice to the often under-recognized nursing profession.
Only lately, though, while writing her second book, The Shift, did Ms. Brown realize not just how much her nursing gives shape to her writing, but also how her writing influences her nursing. There's much to mull over in health care and usually not much time to do that. Writing forces Ms. Brown to reflect. She learns both positives and negatives about her nursing work in the process of putting that work into words. In this Medical Center Hour, Ms. Brown talks about how writing, which she loves, makes her a better nurse.
The Catherine Strader McGehee Memorial Lecture of the School of Nursing
Co-presented with the School of Nursing, the Virginia Festival of the Book, and Hospital Drive
Whistle Words is a multimedia project helping women reclaim their sense of self after a life-changing cancer diagnosis--with the simple aid of a pen. Charlottesville-based Whistle Words offers writing workshops for women in and after cancer treatment. Being part of this project as an adjunct or follow-up to treatment can make a real difference in participants' outlook and healing, as demonstrated by women's writings in the recently published anthology, Truth: Voices of Women Changed by Cancer. In this Medical Center Hour, Whistle Words' co-founder Charlotte Matthews and UVA nurse/breast cancer survivor/workshop participant Susan Goins-Eplee introduce Whistle Words and explore the healing power of writing.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Viewing women through an androcentric lens, Western medicine from Hippocrates and Galen forward explained women's behavior from headache to "troublemaking" as unhealthful signs of "hysteria," a suffocating madness believed due to a wandering womb. Centuries, even millennia before Freud asked, "What do women really want?" medical men assumed they knew what women with hysteria needed, and that remedy was pelvic massage to "paroxysm." By the late nineteenth century, with manufacture of electrified massage instruments, doctors could deliver said therapy more quickly and efficiently. This medical treatment, the Victorian social milieu in which it was prevalent (and popular), and (mis)understandings of female sexuality, intimacy, and inequality are the subjects of young American playwright Sarah Ruhl's comedy, In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (2010). This Medical Center Hour's panelists explore a rich mix of ideas having to do with women, medicine, and The Vibrator Play.
Offered in conjunction with LiveArts' production of "In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play", 1-23 March
