Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Dr. Oliver Smithies Videos Now Online

On March 30, 2009, the UNC Health Sciences Library hosted "A Conversation with Dr. Oliver Smithies." The event was moderated by Dr. Tony Waldrop, UNC Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, and featured a conversation with Smithies and a lengthy question-and-answer with the audience, which was composed of numerous students, researchers, staff, and faculty, as well as members of the public. Several video excerpts from this event are now available online (below); for transcripts of the videos, visit the library web site.

For other Smithies-related postings on the Carolina Curator blog, click here; for a collection of Smithies' Nobel-related materials, visit the Highlights section of the HSL Special Collections web site.

UNC maintains a channel for university-related YouTube videos, which can be accessed at the YouTube site; a playlist for Health & Medicine videos is also available. In addition, UNC Health Care and the School of Medicine maintain a YouTube channel, with playlists for news, grand rounds, and more.














Monday, April 20, 2009

History Essay Deadline Extended

The deadline for the McLendon-Thomas Award in the History of Medicine has been extended to May 31, 2009. Open to all current UNC-CH students in Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, and Allied Health, the award is sponsored by the Bullitt History of Medicine Club and offers a prize of $500 for the best essay on any aspect of the history of the health sciences. Visit the Bullitt Club web site for essay guidelines.

Funded by UNC alumni S. Gregory Boyd (MD '03, JD '04) and Laura Boyd (JD '02), the McLendon-Thomas Award honors Dr. William McLendon and Dr. Colin Thomas, Jr. and recognizes scholarly excellence in the history of health sciences. Greg and Laura Boyd live in New York City, where he is an attorney with Davis & Gilbert LLP and she is a legal recruiter with SJL Attorney Search. Greg considers the history of medicine to be one of the most important aspects of his medical education and and Drs. McClendon and Thomas among the best role models possible. They both strongly believe that the history of medicine represents a critical perspective and focus on the art of medicine that are necessary for training the best possible physicians, health care executives, and policy makers.

Dr. William W. McLendon served from 1973-1995 at UNC as Director of the Hospital Clinical Laboratories and as Professor and Vice-Chair of Pathology. Since his retirement in 1995 he has been Professor Emeritus of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. An MD graduate of UNC in 1956, he and Bob Whitlock (MD '57) were the student co-founders in 1954 of the Bullitt History of Medicine Club. Dr. McLendon is the co-author, along with the late Drs. William Blythe and Floyd Denny, of the recently published Bettering the Health of the People: W. Reece Berryhill, the UNC School of Medicine, and the North Carolina Good Health Movement.

Dr. Colin G. Thomas, Jr. joined the faculty of the UNC School of Medicine in 1952, and is currently Byah Thomason-Sanford Doxey Professor of Surgery. From 1966-1984 he served as Chair of the Department of Surgery, and from 1984-1989 as Chief of the Division of General Surgery. Dr. Thomas was one of the early faculty members of the Bullitt History of Medicine Club, and is the co-author, along with Mary Jane Kagarise, of the 1997 history, Legends and
Legacies: A Look Inside: Four Decades of Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1952-1993
.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Online Exhibition: UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health

"UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health: Meeting the Public Health Challenges of the 21st Century" is a new online exhibition at the UNC Health Sciences Library that features both current initiatives and the history of the School, which was renamed on September 26, 2008 following a $50 million gift from Joan and Dennis Gillings. Visitors will find sections on the Gillings Gift, Research and Teaching, Community and Global Outreach, Water, School History and Deans, North Carolina Public Health History, and a research guide to public health resources at UNC.

Based on a collaborative exhibition which is still on display at the Health Sciences Library, the online version incorporates audio and video selections (such as highlights from the naming ceremony and oral history interviews), a slide show from the Daniel Okun Papers, and many other materials. Library collections and projects are also well represented, including NC Health Info, the AHEC Digital Library, the UNC Project Library in Malawi, and digital initiatives at the library, etc.

Information on other exhibitions at HSL, University Libraries, and UNC is available at the Exhibitions section of the HSL Special Collections web site.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

We Celebrate All Our Champions






















. . . Whether They Can Dunk or Not

Congratulations to all the scholars, athletes, and scholar-athletes at UNC! Highlights from the Tar Heels 2009 NCAA men's basketball championship are available online.

For PDFs of images above, click student poster or Smithies poster. (UNC Professor Oliver Smithies' Nobel-related materials are also available online.)

Thursday, April 2, 2009

The History of Eugenics in North Carolina

In North Carolina over 7,600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1974 under the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program. Indiana was the first state to implement such a program, and eventually over 30 states followed suit, including North Carolina in 1929. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina reviewed petitions for sterilizations and authorized sterilizations in over 90% of cases. Of those sterilized, approximately 38% were black and 84% were female; moreover, 71% were classified as “feebleminded.” While most states’ sterilization programs diminished in scope after World War II, almost 80% of North Carolina’s cases occurred after 1945. By the late 1960’s over 60% of those sterilized in North Carolina were black and 99% were female.

North Carolina Governor Michael Easley established a committee to investigate the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program, and currently the General Assembly of North Carolina is considering two bills: House Bill 21, Eugenics Program – Support and Education and Senate Bill 179, Sterilization Compensation.

House Bill 21 is: “An act to provide counseling benefits to eugenics survivors, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a database of eugenics program participants and verify the status of persons contacting the state to determine their participation in the state program, to erect a historical marker about the program, to direct the State Board of Education to include information about the program in its K-12 history curriculum, to recommend creation of an ethics training module for state, county, and local government employees, and to direct the Department of Cultural Resources to digitize existing records for preservation and study purposes, as recommended by the House Select Committee on Compensation for Victims of the Eugenics Sterilization.”

Senate Bill 179
proposes that: “Any person who, as a result of the eugenic sterilization program in this State, was sterilized between the years of 1929 and 1975 shall receive compensation as provided for in this section if the person submits a claim before June 30, 2012."

The current status of both bills, as for any pending legislation, can be tracked online at the web site of the General Assembly of North Carolina: House Bill 21 and Senate Bill 179.

Readers interested in learning more about this topic can visit Eugenics in North Carolina, a web project of the State Library of North Carolina. The Winston-Salem Journal also has an online eugenics project, entitled Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization Program.

In addition, Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library, in collaboration with the Carolina Digital Library and Archive, has digitized all volumes of the Biennial Report of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina [1934-1966], as well as North Carolina journals and documents in public health and other areas as part of an ongoing digital initiative.

Bullitt Lecture on Blemished Bodies and Persons

The next joint meeting of UNC’s Bullitt History of Medicine Club and Duke’s Trent History of Medicine Society will be Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at the UNC Health Sciences Library in the 5th Floor Conference Room (527). Please join us at 5:30pm for light refreshments followed by the lecture at 6pm. Meetings are free and open to the public.

Dr. Sue Estroff, Professor of Social Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, will be presenting a lecture entitled, "Blemished Bodies and Persons: An Historical Perspective on Stigma."

Sue E. Estroff, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine, and adjunct professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her studies include: B.A., Duke University, magna cum laude, 1972; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978 (Anthropology); Post Doctoral Fellow in Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1978-1981. She joined the UNC faculty in 1982, and was Chair of the Faculty from 2000-03. In 1984, she received the Margaret Mead award from the American Anthropological Association and Society for Applied Anthropology, and she has served as past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Dr. Estroff's research areas include: individuals with chronic illness and disabilities; cultural approaches to psychosis; sociocultural factors that influence the course of psychiatric disorders; disability income policy and practice; illness narratives; moral reasoning and the production of knowledge in qualitative scholarship; reconsidering the association of violence with persons with psychiatric disorders; and complexities of consent in maternal fetal surgery. Estroff teaches medical students, supervises dissertators in the Department of Anthropology, serves on thesis committees across campus, and teaches graduate seminars in methods and ethics.

Dr. Estroff is a co-editor of The Social Medicine Reader, which is now in its second edition. Other recent publications include: ‘No Other Way to Go’ Pathways to Disability Income Among Persons with Severe, Persistent Mental Illness; Whose Story Is It Anyway: Authority, Voice, and Responsibility in Narratives of Chronic Illness; The Influence of Social Networks and Social Support on Violence by Persons with Serious Mental Illness; Risk Reconsidered: Targets of Violence in the Social Networks of People with Serious Psychiatric Disorders; The Cultural Calculus of Consent in Experimental Maternal Fetal Surger; Recognizing and Responding To Early Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis Of Individual Narratives; and From Stigma to Discrimination: An Analysis of Community Efforts to Reduce the Negative Consequences of a Psychiatric Disorder and Label.

For directions to the UNC Health Sciences Library, visit the HSL website. The Robertson Scholars Express Bus travels non-stop between UNC (Morehead Planetarium) and Duke (Chapel Circle).

For more information on the Bullitt Club, please visit the Bullitt website. Bullitt lectures for 2008-9 are now available as mp3 downloads.

Bullitt Lecture on Poverty-Disease Link in Washington, D.C.

The next noontime meeting of the Bullitt History of Medicine Club will be Monday, April 6, 2009 at the UNC Health Sciences Library in the 5th Floor Conference Room (527). Please join us from 12-1pm for light refreshments and lecture. Meetings are free and open to the public.

Lisa Wiese, second-year medical student at UNC School of Medicine, will be presenting a lecture entitled, “Washington, D.C.: Understanding the Poverty-Disease Link from an Historical Lens.”

The talk will give an historical perspective on why certain Washington, D.C. neighborhoods have high rates of concentrated poverty. Lisa will also be talking about how economic marginalization impacts the health of city residents, and what is being done to address the poverty-pathology link in the district.

Visit the Bullitt Club web site for further information on club activities; Bullitt lectures for 2008-9 are now available online as mp3 downloads.