Pain- A Political History: Liberal Relief and Conservative Care?
Date: Wednesday, November 11th
Time: 12:30-1:30 pm
Location: Jordan Conference Center Auditorium
When is pain real? Does too-liberal, overly compassionate relief create addiction? Is chronic pain a legitimate basis for disability claims and long-term benefits? What should we do when end-of-life pain care resembles physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia? Professor Keith Wailoo (Princeton University) explores the political and cultural history of these complex medical and social debates; how physicians, patients, politicians, and the courts have shaped ideas about pain and its relief; and how the question “who is in pain and how much relief do they deserve?” has became a microcosm of broader debates over disability, citizenship, liberalism, and conservatism in American society.
KOOLer Smokes
Date: Wednesday, November 11th
Time: 3:00-4:30 pm
Location: OpenGrounds
Professor Wailoo will introduce his current research on the mentholated cigarette, in the context of broader issues of smoking and public health, as well as race, gender, and targeted marketing. Everyone is welcome.
Biology Department Seminar
Date: Friday, November 13th
12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Gilmer 190
Benjamin Martin, PhD., Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Stony Brook University will present his research: "Tales of fish tails: what the zebrafish tailbud can tell us about stem cell biology and human disease.”
Modern Medicine and the Invention of Poetic Form
Led Professor Kiera Allison
Friday, November 13th
Friday, November 13th
Time: 3:00 pm
This session explores the well-established, but so far under-investigated liaison between the medical sciences and the language arts in Modern Western culture. We’ll see in particular how these disciplines learned from one another how to manipulate the physical being—the pulses, nervous systems, and the brainwaves—of the public they were sometimes diagnosing, sometimes trying to heal and entertain. The father of modern cardiology (William Harvey, 1628) joins with the creator of modern verse (Shakespeare, perfecting the blank-verse “pulse” that’s been the standard ever since); two centuries later the Romantic school are reading up (in their spare time) on the science of the central nervous system. And one young pre-med, John Keats, is taking assiduous notes on human anatomy...only to find that poetry, not medicine, would be the better use for all this knowledge. Come along for an hour of deep reading, close listening, and plenty of open conversation to explore what those connections mean for the history of literature, and—most importantly—for our experience as readers. To register for this FlashSem, please click here!
