Harriet W. Sheridan Lecture

Suzanne Poirier will examine the daily dilemmas of family caregivers

The 1996 Harriet W. Sheridan Literature and Medicine Endowed Lecture will be given by author Suzanne Poirier at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 001 of the Salomon Center for Teaching. Her lecture is titled "I Think She's Gonna Bury Me': Stories of Family Care Giving."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Author Suzanne Poirier will give the 1996 Harriet W. Sheridan Literature and Medicine Endowed Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 001 of the Salomon Center for Teaching. Her lecture is titled "`I Think She's Gonna Bury Me': Stories of Family Care Giving." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Poirier will also give a community talk at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 11, in the auditorium of St. Joseph's Hospital in South Providence. She will examine the role of literature in understanding the complexities involved in the human dimensions of health care decisions and in bringing together the knowledge of health care professionals with the experiences of the sick and their families. This program is funded by the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities (RICH), and will serve as a pilot for the 1997 RICH Public Symposium Project, "Literature and Medicine for the 21st Century: Perspectives of Doctors and Patients."

Poirier is editor of Literature in Medicine - the major journal in the field - and acting head of Medical Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She just completed a sabbatical year during which she interviewed caregivers about their experiences. Her talks will be based on these interviews. Poirier holds a doctorate in literature with a concentration in women's studies. In the College of Medicine she participates in courses on ethics and social issues as well as teaching a clinical elective, "Literature and Medicine."

Her research, often done with other humanists and health professionals, has dealt with images of health professionals in a variety of media, the language of such medical genres as the chart and the case report, and the experiences of women as both patients and health practitioners. She has taught courses on such topics as history and literature of women's health, literature and aging, and AIDS and literature. Her latest book is Chicago's War Against Syphilis: The Times, The "Trib," and the Clap Doctor.

Harriet W. Sheridan

Harriet W. Sheridan, dean of the College at Brown from 1979 to 1987, who died in 1992, developed a literature in medicine course at Brown which was popular with both medical and non-medical students. In her honor an endowed lectureship has been established at the School of Medicine to provide a forum for the interdisciplinary exploration of doctors, doctoring, illness and healing in literature.

Past lecturers include Dr. John Stone, essayist and poet; Anne Hudson Jones, professor of literature and medicine; and Dr. Richard Selzer, author and retired surgeon.