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THE POLITICS OF VACCINATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
17 September 2008, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm James Colgrove, Ph.D., M.P.H., Biochemistry and Medical Humanities, Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York NY
Podcast of James Colgrove's, "THE POLITICS OF VACCINATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY"
Vaccination raises unique ethical, political, and legal questions. Like any medical intervention, vaccination carries with it the small risk of adverse reactions. Unlike other procedures, however, it is performed on healthy people, most commonly children, and, importantly, vaccination has been mandated by law because of its community-wide benefits. For much of the life of this country, and especially during the past 150 years, public health and medical professionals have sought to achieve high levels of vaccine use in the U.S. population against a growing catalogue of infectious diseases. Nevertheless, vaccination policy and practices have always been subject to challenges by individuals and groups and, even today, controversies swirl in association with efforts to vaccinate our population. While the science of vaccination has often seemed clear and straightforward, the politics of vaccination is quite another matter, and this Medical Center Hour inquires into that complex situation across our country's history and into the present moment. Co-presented with the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections of the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.
DISSECTION, DECEPTION, AND RESURRECTION: ANATOMICAL INSTRUCTION IN VIRGINIA IN THE 19TH CENTURY
1 October 2008, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm Jodi L. Koste, M.A., Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA
Study of anatomy has for centuries been an integral - and often highly charged - part of medical education. Anatomical instruction and dissection were inculcated in American medical education in 1765, with the founding of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania. As other medical schools formed in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, they also incorporated anatomical dissection into their formal instructional program. Both the University of Virginia and the Medical Department of Hampden Sydney College, later the Medical College of Virginia, took pride in their anatomy classes. Of course, anatomical study required a ready supply of cadavers. In the period before the 1884 passage of the Virginia Anatomical Act, legislation which legalized procurement of dead bodies for anatomical study, the two schools both cooperated and competed in their quests to obtain appropriate human dissection material for instructional purposes. This Medical Center Hour explores the two schools' stories of deception, dissection, and resurrection and affords insight into anatomical instruction in 19th-century Virginia. Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
CAN WE AFFORD HEALTH CARE FOR THE BABY BOOM? AN ALTERNATIVE VISION
21 January 2009, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm Jeff Goldsmith, Ph.D., Health Futures, Inc., Charlottesville VA, and Department of Public Health Sciences, UVa and Carolyn L. Engelhard, M.P.A., Department of Public Health Sciences, UVa
In 2006, the first baby boomers in the U.S. turned 60. Concern was voiced then about the affordability of retirement — including health care expenditures — for this unusually large segment of our population; indeed, there were gloomy predictions that, in retirement, the boomers would be such an albatross around society’s neck that, barring major reforms, Social Security and Medicare simply could not accommodate this generation’s needs, much less those of succeeding generations. But conventional wisdom may not hold true for boomers, whose roadmap for the future seems not to call for retirement en masse or at the earliest opportunity. Indeed, there are ways to see the baby boom as a wave of seniors who will bring considerable resources, financial and otherwise, into their later years. Can the nation craft social policies that will foster a pro-work, pro-savings, pro-health improvement culture for boomers in retirement and for later generations? Social scientist and futurist Jeff Goldsmith takes an optimistic view of this situation, particularly in his latest book, The Long Baby Boom: An Optimistic Vision for a Graying Generation (2008). But what about now, when the U.S. faces its gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Is it all gloom and doom, or might there be ways to reconceive and manage the boomers’ retirement and health care in constructive, socially beneficial ways? Indeed, in these first days of the Obama administration, can we be hopeful on this front, too? This Medical Center Hour features Jeff Goldsmith and Carolyn Engelhard, health policy analyst and co-author of Health Care Half-Truths, and their views on what retirement for the baby boom can or will look like, especially with respect to health care. Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series.
A DOCTOR'S REFLECTIONS ON ILLNESS IN A HIGH-TECH ERA
18 February 2009, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm Robert L. Martensen, M.D., Ph.D., Office of History, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda MD; Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA; American College of Surgeons and Cunniff-Dixon Foundation on Palliative Care Education for Physicians
Podcast of Robert L. Martensen's, "A DOCTOR'S REFLECTIONS ON ILLNESS IN A HIGH-TECH ERA"
Emergency physician, historian of medicine, and bioethicist Robert Martensen has worked —combining clinical practice, history of medicine, and bioethics — at medical institutions across this country, including Harvard, the University of Kansas, and Tulane. He is author most recently of A Life Worth Living: A Doctor’s Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era, a book written for a general audience about the medical challenges facing patients and their families in our country today. As health care reform looms as a possibility for the U.S., what is the state of medical care in our nation, for each of us and for our families and communities? What are our most common serious chronic illnesses and conditions, our health-care system’s present approaches to serious illness and to the end of life, the most pressing ethical questions facing the medical profession, the health-care industry, and our society? In this Medical Center Hour, drawing on historical background and on clinical cases from his practice, Dr. Martensen explores some of the more difficult dilemmas in contemporary American medicine for patients, families, health care professionals, and policymakers.
OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: READING THE WRITTEN FEMALE BODY
11 March 2009, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm Susan Wells, Ph.D., Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa; JoAnn V. Pinkerton, M.D., Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, UVa; Miriam A. Bender, J.D., Women's Health Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Videocast of Susan Wells's, "OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: READING THE WRITTEN FEMALE BODY " Watch the YouTube Video
First published in 1973 as an oversized paperback with newsprint pages, the Boston Women's Health Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves was a revelation to legions of readers: an owner's manual for the female body. Now in its eighth edition (a 35th anniversary edition) and online, Our Bodies, Ourselves remains an important and empowering source of information for women about their bodies and their health.
This Medical Center Hour inquires into the writing of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the relationships forged between the collective authors and their readers and between the book's readers and their own anatomies. How has the Boston Women's Health Collective's book changed how women understand their bodies and their lives and how they approach their health and health care? How has the book's first generation of readers, Baby Boomers all, handled their health care and the aging of their bodies? What debts do women's health initiatives today and tomorrow–clinical programs and advocacy organizations alike–owe to this landmark text and its authors?
WHEN GERMS TRAVEL: SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF CONTAGIOUS CRISES ACROSS TIME
1 April 2009, Wednesday, 12:30-1:30 pm Howard Markel M.D., Ph.D., Department of Pediatrics, Department of Communicable Diseases, Center for the History of Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI
Videocast of Howard Markel's, "WHEN GERMS TRAVEL: SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF CONTAGIOUS CRISES ACROSS TIME" Watch the YouTube Video
Epidemics of communicable disease have plagued societies and caused public health crises from antiquity to the present. In response, communities have developed an array of strategies to prevent or contain disease outbreaks, including isolation and quarantine practices, sanitary codes, public health regulations, trade and travel restrictions, and medical inspection of immigrants during periods of significant human migration. This Medical Center Hour with distinguished physician-historian Howard Markel explores the continuing challenges of contagious disease to public health and social order through comparative discussion of major pandemics, including bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, cholera in the 19th century, and 20th and 21st century concerns about influenza. In what ways are we all at risk when germs travel? How can the lessons of history inform contemporary public health policy and pandemic preparedness planning?