January 12, 2023
From Silence to Recognition:
Confronting Discrimination in Emory's Dental School History
A compelling documentary by Perry Brickman, DDS
Dr. Brickman, who practiced oral surgery in Atlanta for more than 40 years, is a founding member and past president of the Georgia Society of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. He has served on the Georgia Board of Dental Examiners as well as in leadership roles of numerous civic organizations including the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta. In 2016 he received The Emory Medal, the university’s highest honor.
February 9, 2023
Health Care of Japanese Americans Involuntarily
Incarcerated in World War II
...and how anti-Asian racism in medicine persists today
Don K. Nakayama, MD
Dr. Don K. Nakayama, a pediatric surgeon and Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written extensively on the history of surgery. He is a graduate of Stanford University and earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, where he completed his residency in general surgery and a research fellowship in fetal surgery. He also completed a fellowship in pediatric surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He serves as editor-in-chief of The American Surgeon and as treasurer of the American College of Surgeons.
April 6, 2023
Revisiting two papers by revered Tuscaloosa internist John Burnum, MD:
“Dialect is Diagnostic” and “La Maladie du Petit Papier”*
Alan Blum, MD
A native of Tuscaloosa, Dr. Burnum (1923-2005) was an internist for more than 40 years and a faculty member of the College of Community Health Sciences from its founding in 1972 to his retirement in 1999. An author of admiring articles about his West Alabama patients in The New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Burnum wrote that “an appreciation of dialect heightens respect for patients and gives the physician a sense of continuity with cultures and ages past. It also makes practice more fun, makes history taking and diagnosis easier, and lessens misunderstandings with patients. Understanding and respect for medical dialect can be a powerful aid to patient care…”
Special Added Feature: Poet Pris Campbell, who suffers from a debilitating condition, reads four of her heart-rending poems.
*“The Illness of the little piece of paper”
May 4, 2023
The Vital Role of Face-to-Face Encounters in Medical Education
Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD
New technology has increased the gap between medical students and patients’ faces. Students forego lecture attendance to review recordings and pore over question banks. As a result, they spend less time in the presence of teachers, fellow students, and patients, with fewer face-to-face encounters. Their ethical faculties are less engaged, depriving them of opportunities to deepen and enrich their sense of professional and human responsibility. These educational trends are antithetical to medicine’s core ethical imperatives. There is more to becoming a doctor than assimilating information, and more to teaching medicine than transmitting content. Physicians are most deeply and fully formed not by selecting the one best response to a multiple-choice question, but through face-to-face encounters with fellow health professionals and patients.
Dr. Richard Gunderman is Chancellor’s Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and Health Studies at Indiana University, where he also serves as Bicentennial Professor and John A. Campbell Professor of Radiology. He is the author of 15 books and hundreds of journal articles, and he has received the Association of American Medical Colleges top teaching award.
To read The Importance of Face-to-face Encounters in Medical Education by Sachin Seetharam, MD, and Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD, click here.
June 1, 2023
“Bringing Osler and Ishiguro to West Texas: the role of Panhandle Health”
Steve Urban, MD
Dr. Steve Urban was raised on the family wheat farm near Perryton, a small town in West Texas. An English major at Texas Christian University and a magna cum laude graduate of Baylor College of Medicine, he completed his internal medicine residency at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. As a gastroenterologist, Dr. Urban served on the internal medicine faculty at Texas Tech University School of Medicine’s regional campus in Amarillo for nearly 40 years, during which he was clerkship director for the medical students, program director of the internal medicine residency, and regional director for the medical ethics and humanism elective. Since 2017, Dr. Urban has been the editor of Panhandle Health, the only medical journal in the nation published by a county medical society.
June 6, 2023
The Art of Medicine Rounds:
One Medical School’s Experience with a Health Humanities Series Open to All
Alan Blum, MD, Andrea Wright, MLIS, and Nelle Williams, MSLS
How important is exposure to the humanities in developing well-rounded, compassionate, and empathetic physicians? Intuitively, the opportunity to discuss novels, paintings, poetry, music, dance, plays, and movies during medical training can reduce physician burnout and enhance understanding of patients and families. Yet the increasing emphasis on multiple choice tests in medical school has diminished attention to communication skills and the role of physicians as educators. The idea behind the College of Community Health Sciences’ monthly Art of Medicine Rounds is to offer regular exposure to the arts to all students, residents, and faculty for sheer enjoyment and a greater sense of community. The series has produced over 130 presentations and performances at CCHS since 2012.
July 6, 2023
“On Giving of Oneself”
Sachin Shenoy, MD
After his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, Dr. Shenoy completed a fellowship in minimally invasive gynecological surgery at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at the College of Community Health Sciences as Assistant Professor and Clerkship Director in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Shenoy served on the medical and surgical staff of the Institute for Femail Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery in Allentown.
August 3, 2023
Opera: A prescription for Joy
Paul Houghtaling, DMA
Director of Opera and Co-Coordinator of Voice
University of Alabama School of Music
August 15, 2023
Radical Connections: Humanizing Healthcare with All Kinds of Artists
Carol Wiebe, MD, MBA
People experiencing mental or physical distress should be surrounded by healing environments. Connecting arts and health can improve the quality of life not only for patients but also for everyone who works in healthcare. As a family physician, chamber musician, and former hospital executive, Dr Carol Wiebe uses her broad training and experience to create opportunities and spaces where people can find meaning and healing. Before becoming a doctor, she studied music performance on piano and flute. Dr. Wiebe co-founded ConcertDocs in 2017 and Radical Connections in 2021, programs that bring music, the visual arts, poetry, plays, and dance into hospitals and care settings.
September 7, 2023
Hidden in Plain Sight:
How artists’ depictions of slavery attempted to conceal reality
Rachel Stephens, PhD
Dr. Rachel Stephens, associate professor of art history at the University of Alabama, is a noted researcher of nineteenth-century southern art. In her latest book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, published this week, she delves into the implications of southern art in the history, culture, and politics of the pro-slavery movement and how artists responded to abolitionist works by covering over the realities of slavery and enslaved people.
October 12, 2023
Cuthbert Simpkins, MD
Dr. Simpkins is the Sosland Endowed Chair in Trauma Services in the Department of Surgery at the UMKC School of Medicine in Kansas City, Missouri. He is also the author of a biography of the great jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. The New York Times book reviewer wrote, "Dr. Simpkins very often accomplishes something that few other jazz biographers have done: He narratively simulates the emotional effect of the subject's music.”
November 2, 2023
Co-author David Fletcher, MD shares stories from his two recent books, Chili Dog MVP: Dick Allen, the '72 White Sox and A Transforming Chicago and Joe Jackson, Plaintiff, vs Chicago American League Baseball Club, Defendant: The Never-Before-Seen Trial Transcript. A graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago, Dr. Fletcher practices occupational medicine in Champaign, Illinois. He is also a noted baseball historian and is the founder and president of the Chicago Baseball Museum (https://chicagobaseballmuseum.org/).
For many years Dr. Fletcher has championed the achievements of Dick Allen, seven-time All-Star and the 1972 American League Most Valuable Player. Allen never overcame his reputation as an angry African American among the sportswriters who fill out Hall of Fame ballots. Enduring taunts in his minor league days as the first Black star to play in Little Rock, Arkansas, and through most of his major league years playing in Philadelphia and Chicago where race relations were tense, Allen became the best hitter in baseball from 1964 to 1974. Dr. Fletcher has also worked to clear the name of Chicago White Sox third baseman George “Buck” Weaver who was banned from baseball in the wake of the Black Sox game-fixing scandal in the 1919 World Series.
December 7, 2023
William MacGregor is a theater artist and a doctoral student in the Health Policy and Equity Graduate Program at York University in Toronto, Canada. Informed by his own experience with disability, chronic illness, and chronic pain, his research critically examines population health, disability-related policies and programs, and health care policy. MacGregor has appeared in numerous theatrical productions, most recently at the Toronto Fringe Festival, and is working on turning Quietus, his one-patient show, into a stage play.