Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities-Letters, Fall 2003

Letters Archive

F all 2003, Vol. 12, No. 1 (requires Adobe Acrobat)
Medicine, Health, and Society, An Interview with Matthew Ramsey and Larry Churchill Medicine, Health, and Society: 2003/2004 Fellows Program 2004/2005 Fellowships Stephen J. Pyne to Deliver 2003 Howard Lecture 2004 Warren Center Summer Graduate Student Fellows Program 2002/2003 Warren Center Fellows Conference Race and Wealth Disparity in 21st-Century America
2004/2005 Fellowships Stephen J. Pyne to Deliver 2003 Howard Lecture 2004 Warren Center Summer Graduate Student Fellows Program 2002/2003 Warren Center Fellows Conference Race and Wealth Disparity in 21st-Century America

Medicine, Health, and Society: 2003/2004 Fellows Program

LARRY R. CHURCHILLl, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, is Spence and Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow and co-director of the Fellows Program. He is known for his work on the social and cultural dimensions of health care and health policy, and has published on many topics in medical ethics, medicine and literature, and medicine and philosophy. He is the co-author (with H. L. Smith) of Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine: Beyond Dilemmas and Decorum (Duke University Press, 1986); Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); co-editor (with N. M. P. King and A. W. Cross) of The Physician as Captain of the Ship: A Critical Reappraisal (D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1988); Self-Interest and Universal Health Care: Why Well-Insured Americans Should Support Coverage for Everyone (Harvard University Press, 1994); co-editor (with G. Henderon, N. Strauss, and R. Estroff) of The Social Medicine Reader (Duke University Press, 1997); Ethical Dimensions of Health Policy (Oxford University Press, 2002) co-edited with Marion Danis and Carolyn Clancy; and most recently, series editor (with Allan M. Brandt) of Ethical Dimensions of Studies in Social Medicine (forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press). His current research interests include access to health care and the ethical dimensions of health policy.

CRAIG ANNE HEFLINGER, associate professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development, has received numerous honors and awards for her research in child and family health services. She is co-editor of Families and the Mental Health System for Children and Adolescents: Policy, Services, and Research (Sage, 1996) and co-author (with L. Bickman, P. R. Guthrie, E. M. Foster, E. W. Lambert, W. T. Summerfelt, and C. Breda) of Managed Care in Mental Health: The Fort Bragg Experiment (Plenum Press, 1995). Heflinger’s recent work involves using large data sets to examine health care access and service use patterns. She is currently focusing on personal and cultural perceptions of health, and factors influencing decisions to seek formal health care.

LEONARD M. HUMMEL, assistant professor of pastoral theology and counseling, is director of research for religion and spirituality at the Pain and Symptom Management Program of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. He is the author of God on the Gallows: Consolation for Suffering in Luther’s Theology and Lutheran Practice (Fortress Press, 2002). He is currently collaborating with medical researchers on a proposal titled “Facing Death: Cancer and Spiritual Transformation.” He is particularly interested in analyzing the religious and theological dimensions of spiritual transformation among persons with cancer, as well as in the inter-related dimensions of culture, history, politics, and economics in the phenomenon of cancer.

SCOTT PEARSON is assistant professor of surgery at the Division of Surgical Oncology at the Medical Center. Pearson’s research is primarily focused on racial disparity in the outcome of breast cancer. He is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and abstracts on surgical oncology. He is currently developing an interdisciplinary training program in narrative medicine that teaches medical students to view their patients in a broader cultural context. The goal of this program is to teach physicians to include and address early in patient interaction the impact of issues of race, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, and spirituality on the patient’s care.

STEPHEN D. RACHMAN, associate professor of English at Michigan State University, was awarded the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellowship for the 2003/2004 Warren Center Fellows Program. He is the co-editor (with Shawn Rosenheim) of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cultural Pathology: Disease and Literature in Nineteenth Century America (forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2004); and co-author (with Peter Vinten-Johansen, Howard Brody, Nigel Paneth, and Michael Rip) of Cholera, Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press, 2003); as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century American literature and literature and medicine. While at the Warren Center, Rachman will continue work on a book project titled “Memento Morbi: Lam Qua’s Paintings, Peter Parker’s Patients,” which is about the medical/aesthetic relationship between a leading American medical missionary in China, the Reverend Dr. Peter Parker, and the 19th-century Cantonese artist, Lam Qua, whose oil paintings depict Parker’s patients.

MATTHEW RAMSEY, associate professor of history, is Jacque Voegeli Fellow and co-director of the Fellows Program. He is also the director of the Medicine, Health, and Society Center at Vanderbilt. His research interests concern the social and cultural history of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. He is the author of Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge University Press, History of Medicine series, 1988); a short monograph, The Politics of Professional Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The French Model and Its Rivals in Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (ed. Gerald L. Geison, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the history of medicine. He is currently at work on a book project entitled “The Development of Professional Monopoly in French Medicine,” as well as a book on the therapeutic uses of the human body in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, which is based on a series of lectures that he delivered in France in the summer of 2003.

RUTH ROGASKI recently joined Vanderbilt as associate professor of history. Her research focuses on the intersection between corporeal experience and Chinese constructions of modernity. Her first book, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Heath and Disease in Treaty-Port China (forthcoming, University of California Press, 2003), explores China’s engagements with imperialism and modernity through the lens of medical history, examining in particular how hygiene became both a major marker of Chinese deficiency and a cornerstone of imagined modernity. She is currently working on a second book on the role of the biological sciences in the construction of Asian empires.

PEGGY A. THOITS, professor of sociology, specializes in the sociology of mental health; social psychology; the sociology of emotion; self and identity; and stress, coping, and support processes, and is the author of many articles on these subjects. She is currently engaged in studying stress from a social psychological perspective and plans to use her fellowship to bring two aspects of her research (on coping with identity-threatening events and effective forms of social support) into one pilot project. She recently co-edited (with Peter J. Burke, Timothy J. Owens, and Richard Serpe) Advances in Identity Theory and Research, (Kluewer Academic/Plenum, 2003). Thoits is currently collaborating with a colleague at Tokyo Metropolitan University on a cross-cultural comparison of depression in Japan and the U.S.

ARLEEN M. TUCHMAN, associate professor of history, is the author of Science, Medicine and the State in Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 (Oxford University Press, 1993). She is completing a biography of Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (1829–1902), one of the most prominent female doctors in post-Civil War America and founder of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, an institution that catered both to the care of the poor and the education of female physicians. Upon completion of the biography, Tuchman will begin research for a book-length study on the history of diabetes in the United States, focusing on the history of the disease as well the history of health and health care disparities.history of diabetes in the United States, focusing on the history of the disease as well the history of health and health care disparities.

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