January 17, 2003

To: News Director

From: Institute for Medieval Studies
University of New Mexico
311/313 Humanities Bldg.
Albuquerque, NM 87131
Contact: Timothy C. Graham
Phone: 505-277-2252/277-1191
Fax: 505-277-1183
Website: http://www.unm.edu/~medinst
E-mail: medinst@unm.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UNM's Institute for Medieval Studies Holds Major Seminar on Hospitals and Healthcare, Past and Present

Albuquerque, NM. The Institute for Medieval Studies presents a weekend seminar of free lectures and discussion of the topic "Medieval Hospitals, Leper Houses, and Leprosy," February 7-8, 2003, in Room 122 of Northrop Hall on the main campus of the University of New Mexico. The seminar will analyze how hospitals and healthcare evolved during the Middle Ages and will examine how our contemporary experience of healthcare measures up when viewed through the lens of the medieval experience. The lecturers will include distinguished experts on the history of medicine from other universities and prominent members of the Albuquerque medical community. Members of the public are welcome to attend either the whole event or individual sessions.

The topic is especially relevant at this time when healthcare is such a political "hot potato," when many feel that healthcare in America is in crisis. The lecturers will discuss how hospitals first evolved in the Middle Ages, how medicine and architecture interacted in the medieval hospital, and how medieval doctors responded to leprosy, a disease that carried the kind of social stigma that now attaches to tuberculosis or the AIDS virus. The aims and achievements of the medieval hospital will be compared with those of the modern hospital, and our contemporary response to dangerous diseases, including diseases endemic in New Mexico, will be examined through the lens of the medieval experience.

The special value of this seminar will lie in the unusual opportunity it offers for direct communication between the humanities and the sciences, and between past and present. Scientists and humanities scholars will exchange ideas and observations directly on the key issue of how a humane society deals with its sick. Members of the public will have the opportunity to participate directly in this dialogue and to learn how medieval principles and practices continue to resonate in the modern world.

The seminar is sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences, the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, Presbyterian Heart Group, and KUNM. For more information on this seminar or on other events offered by the Institute for Medieval Studies, call 505-277-2252 or visit the Institute's website at www.unm.edu/~medinst/.

The topics of the lectures:

Friday, February 7, 7:00 p.m.
Dr. Paul T. Cochran, "2003 - Is It the Best of Times or the Worst of Times To Be Sick?"
Following welcoming remarks by Vice Provost for Research Terry L. Yates, Dr. Paul T. Cochran, medical director for Presbyterian Healthcare Services and a leading figure in the New Mexico medical community, will open the proceedings with a lecture surveying the current state of healthcare in the United States. He will identify three phases in American healthcare policy since the inception of Medicare: an emphasis on access to care in the 1960s and the early 1970s; a preoccupation with cost lasting into the 1990s; and the current focus on quality of care, which has developed out of consumer-centered market pressure. He will describe how the complex administrative organization of the modern hospital has evolved in response to policy shifts and changing societal expectations, and will highlight the way in which Albuquerque has often been perceived as being at the forefront of this evolution.

Friday, February 7, 7:30 p.m.
Professor Carole Rawcliffe, "A Word from Our Sponsor: Patrons and Patronage in the Medieval Hospital"
Carole Rawcliffe, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, will offer a lecture complementing Dr. Cochran's by describing how hospitals and healthcare first developed in the Middle Ages. She will analyze the motives of the men and women who built hospitals and examine the art, architecture, and topography of the medieval hospitals. She will argue that the primary purpose of medieval foundations was - in contrast to the underlying rationale of the modern hospital - to secure the spiritual health of the patron as well as the patient. Hospitals and leper houses offered rich and powerful patrons a means of "purchasing paradise" as well as advertising their sense of civic responsibility and Christian compassion. The emphasis on spiritual well-being should not, however, obscure the importance that medieval hospitals placed on physical care of the sick.

Saturday, February 8, 9:00 a.m.
Lynn T. Courtenay, "Medieval Hospitals: Architecture of Charity"
Lynn T. Courtenay, Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin, will describe the emergence of public hospitals in twelfth-century northern Europe and their evolution during the thirteenth century into multi-purpose ensembles that cared for the sick, the poor, and the infirm, as well as providing shelter for pilgrims. These public hospitals offered a significant outlet for piety and architectural patronage through the fifteenth century; typically, they were adjacent to or within towns, and, unlike the earlier monastic hospices and leper houses, they did not develop within a pre-existing religious establishment. In her illustrated lecture, Professor Courtenay will describe how two essential architectural forms combined to create the hospitals of the high Middle Ages: the multi-purpose aisled hall that served as the basic plan for guild halls, and the chapel choir. In medieval hospital plans, these two forms were united conceptually and physically to serve both the infirm and the care-givers in the healing of the body and the salvation of the soul.

Saturday, February 8, 10:15 a.m.
Luke E. Demaitre, "Beyond 'The Disease of the Soul': Medical Definitions of Leprosy"
Luke E. Demaitre, Visiting Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Virginia, will describe how the Middle Ages responded to the disease of leprosy, which carried a strong social stigma with it, a stigma comparable to that associated with the AIDS virus in our own day. He will show that the response of doctors - in contrast to that of churchmen and the public at large - was practical, focusing on the correct pathology of the disease and on therapeutic attempts to alleviate it; he will also show how in medieval times, the definition of leprosy developed in response to advances in medical theory made by major Arabic doctors whose work was known in the West.

Saturday, February 8, 11:30 a.m.
Sarah E. Allen, "Tuberculosis: Today's Disease and Treatment in the United States and the Third World"
As a counterpoint to Professor Demaitre's lecture, Dr. Sarah E. Allen, Associate Professor of Medicine at UNM's Health Sciences Center, will discuss the modern response to tuberculosis, which, like leprosy, carries a particular stigma. After outlining the basic pathophysiology of tuberculosis, Dr. Allen will explain the difference between active and inactive tuberculosis infection, illustrating her talk with pictures showing the various organ systems that can be infected by TB. In discussing how TB is diagnosed and treated, she will review the epidemiology of TB worldwide and show how the TB epidemic has been exacerbated by the global HIV epidemic.

Saturday, February 8, 2:00 p.m.
Carole Rawcliffe, "Patients and Practice in the Medieval Hospital"
Professor Rawcliffe's second lecture will examine the varied expectations of sick paupers and lepers in the Middle Ages, as well as those of the nurses who tended them. She will show that, while many institutions fell short of the ideal, medieval hospitals at their best achieved a model regimen in which the needs of body and soul were carefully balanced; there is a lesson for the modern world in the medieval experience.

Saturday, February 8, 3:15 p.m.
"Panel Discussion: The Role of the Hospital and the Response to Dangerous Diseases, Past and Present," moderated by David A. Bennahum
The weekend event concludes with a panel discussion chaired by David A. Bennahum, Professor of Internal Medicine at UNM's Health Sciences Center. The lecturers will be joined on the panel by experts from the Health Sciences Center. The audience is encouraged to take part in the discussion.

The lecturers:

Paul T. Cochran, M.D., has been a member of the Albuquerque community since 1972. He presently serves as a medical director for Presbyterian Healthcare Services and is a consulting cardiologist with the Presbyterian Heart Group. He is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and received post-graduate training at the University of North Carolina and Georgetown University Medical Center. His career in medicine has involved him in teaching, clinical practice, many physician leadership roles, national healthcare committees, and board memberships. He has served on the board of directors of New Mexico's largest healthcare delivery system, Presbyterian Healthcare Services. His present activities are directed toward ensuring excellence in healthcare delivery at Presbyterian and helping effect improvement in processes of care.

Carole Rawcliffe received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Sheffield, England. Originally a legal and constitutional historian, she was for several years the co-editor of The History of Parliament, the official history of the British House of Commons. In 1992 she became Senior Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, a post sponsored by the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine; she is now Professor of Medieval History at UEA. Her interest in the history of medicine first developed from her investigation of negligence cases brought against medieval surgeons and physicians by their patients. She has written numerous books and articles focusing upon medical practice, hospitals, and the connection between physical and spiritual healing in the Middle Ages. Her most recent book, Medicine for the Soul, brings these themes together in a history of one of England's most remarkable hospitals. She is currently writing a major interdisciplinary study of leprosy in medieval England. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.

Lynn T. Courtenay holds her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is Professor Emerita of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Acknowledged as North America's leading expert in the structural carpentry of medieval buildings, she has a special interest in the architecture of hospitals and cathedrals, on which she has lectured widely in both the United States and Europe. She is the author of The Engineering of Gothic Cathedrals and is currently completing a book on the architecture of the hospital at Tonnerre in France. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of London.

Luke E. Demaitre received his baccalaureate in philosophy from the University of Louvain in his native Belgium, and his Ph.D. in history from the City University of New York. After retiring from teaching at Pace University and Fordham University, he became Visiting Professor in the Program of Humanities in Medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He has also served as consultant at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland since 1998. Prof. Demaitre's publications include books and articles on various aspects of medical theory and practice, ranging from embryology to pediatrics, from diagnosis to therapeutics, and from asthma to cancer. He will be the plenary lecturer at the forthcoming conference on "Petrarch and Medicine" to be held in Italy. He is currently completing a book on leprosy and the pre-modern physician.

Sarah E. Allen, M.D., received her medical degree from the University of Louisville in 1985. She did her internship in San Francisco and the rest of her Internal Medicine training, chief residency, and Infectious Diseases fellowship at the University of New Mexico. She has been on the UNM faculty since 1991 and is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine. She is the director of both the UNM Home IV Antibiotic Clinic and the UNM Adult Cystic Fibrosis Clinic and also cares for HIV/AIDS patients at UNM. She attends on the Infectious Diseases inpatient service at University Hospital where she sees a large variety of serious infections such as Hantavirus, TB, and infections in patients with compromised immune systems. She has lectured nationally and internationally on a variety of subjects including disorders of the spleen, antibiotics, chronic fatigue, tuberculosis, immunizations, and HIV.

David A. Bennahum, M.D., is Professor in the Division of Gerontology at UNM's Department of Internal Medicine. After graduating from the University of Geneva School of Medicine in Switzerland, Dr. Bennahum completed his residency at Roosevelt Hospital in New York and earned a fellowship in Rheumatology and Immunology. He was Chief Resident in Rheumatology at the University of New Mexico from 1969 to 1997. Dr. Bennahum has a great interest in the interface between the humanities and medicine and teaches courses in the ethics, literature, and history of medicine and of public health as well as being a long-time member of the UNM Health Sciences Center Biomedical Ethics Committee.