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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
Some physicians are born to write, while others have writing thrust upon them. As one of the latter, 2013 Moore Lecturer Margaret Mohrmann discusses what she has learned from writing about doctoring. The act of articulating her experiences as a pediatrician and teacher has shown her, over time, much more about her encounters with patients, and about herself, than she could see at the time those events occurred - or even at the time she wrote about them. Rereading one's own stories and having others read (and co-construct) them can expose the "ghost" in the story - "the story's silent twin," as British novelist Jeanette Winterson puts it. What couldn't be said, or wasn't noticed, or was forgotten often gets written in anyway, quietly, between the lines and within word choices and narrative structures. The process of discovering what went unseen before cultivates in both writer and reader the practice of paying close, compassionate attention to what's happening now, an essential ingredient of good doctoring.
The Moore Lecture
What still resonates with you when you're spent? What can a caregiver—or a teacher, a leader, a colleague—offer and do when all else fails, when all that's left is our humanity? In this Medical Center Hour, Tim Cunningham weaves together three stories from disparate sites and desperate situations—the Ebola crisis in West Africa, rural Haiti, and an elite pediatric emergency unit on the Upper East Side of New York City—to inquire into what might matter the most at trying times. A clown, then a nurse, and now the director of the Compassionate Care Initiative and an assistant professor in UVA's School of Nursing, Cunningham shares what he believes matters most when all else is lost—and shows how we all have the capacity to access it.
Co-presented with the Compassionate Care Initiative, School of Nursing