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With malaria a real threat to American troops' fighting fitness, the U.S. government during World War II mounted an all-out hunt for a malaria cure. Tropical-disease researchers with the Rockefeller Foundation took the lead on a secret project that adopted German research models and methods, including use of institutionalized Americans—inmates in six mental hospitals and several large prisons—both for culturing the parasites that cause malaria (there was no animal model) and for testing experimental drugs against the disease. After thousands of failed starts (and much human harm), the researchers had their "magic bullet": a German antimalarial compound captured in battle. This drug, reformulated in the U.S., is chloroquine, one of the most important pharmaceuticals ever made to fight malaria.
In this Medical Center Hour, public health journalist Karen Masterson and infectious diseases specialist Dr. Richard Pearson delve into this tale of secret science in the service of war efforts and into research that was conducted before promulgation of federal rules and regulations governing human participation in biomedical research.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series of Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
In its emphasis on instrumentality, on the patient as something to be acted upon, and on the doctor as an abstracted agent of diagnosis and treatment, medicine often neglects the practitioner's involvement in the clinical scene. Recent attempts to direct attention to this aspect of practice have been stymied by medicine's nearly exclusive reliance on a quantitative, positivist disposition, with which humanist scholarship has had difficulty gaining traction. The narrative medicine movement, as articulated by Dr. Rita Charon of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, has gained widespread attention within the medical academy. But physician and literature scholar Dr. Terrence Holt argues that, for all its positive features (and despite Dr. Charon's efforts to define it otherwise), narrative medicine as applied remains committed to an interventional model that is at odds with the strengths of the humanities. Drawing on readings of texts such as Shakespeare's King Lear, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley's Frankenstein, and the poetry of John Keats, Dr. Holt contends that the value of the humanities in medical education and practice is not as an intervention but as a diagnostic modality—and that the proper first object of diagnosis may not be the patient, but the physician.
The Ellis Moore Lecture of the School of Medicine
This is a flythrough animation of the 3D data from laser scanner data collection at The Mews, Pavilion III, Academical Village, University of Virginia. Data was collected at different periods from 2016, 2023 and 2024. Data was collected with FARO Focus 3D laser scanners and processed with FARO Scene v.2023. Data was imported into Autodesk ReCap for editing and optimization and for the purpose of creating this animation video.
With health care reform on the near horizon and other social realities (aging, immigration, chronic conditions, quests for prevention and wellness) dramatically changing health care in the U.S., what kinds of doctors will our health care system (and its patients) require? Clearly, not just medical school curricula but also the selection process for medical students will be key determinants of whether we have physicians fully prepared to practice as the 21st century progresses. This Medical center hour addresses transformational changes underway in the pre-professional preparation and selection of the nation's medical students, including a new version of the MCAT exam, which goes "live" in 2015. What does this new MCAT signal for premedical students as they prepare for medical school? How might colleges and universities offer their premedical students academic experiences that will better equip them for medical school and medical practice in the 21st century?
Co-presented with the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, UVa
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
The opioid epidemic raging in the U.S., including in Virginia and neighboring states, took nearly two decades to develop and will take years to quell. So says the recent National Academy of Medicine (NAM) report, Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic: Balancing Societal and Individual Benefits and Risks of Prescription Opioid Use (July 2017). Drug overdose due to opioid medications is now this country's leading cause of unintentional injury death. The current crisis is particularly challenging because the epidemic's broad reach "has blurred the formerly distinct social boundary between prescribed opioids and illegally manufactured ones, such as heroin," asserts the NAM committee's chair, UVA law professor Richard J. Bonnie.
In this Medical Center Hour, Professor Bonnie and palliative care specialist Dr. Leslie Blackhall address the impact of this epidemic on public health and patient care and discuss what actions regulatory bodies, health care organizations, and health care professionals could take.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
