Thursday, April 24, 2008
Author and transplant surgeon will discuss mortality
 Dr. Pauline Chen will offer a free public program Tuesday, April 29, at USI. Chen is a transplant surgeon and author. Her particular concern is end-of-life, or palliative, care.In her book Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (Knopf, 2007), Chen investigates why we are so bad at taking care of the dying. The answers she found are a powerful mix of factors: a professional culture that, despite being intimately familiar with death, shrinks from discussing it with patients; the systematic training of young doctors to compartmentalize and dehumanize the patient; and the patient’s indefatigable hope for recovery. She will discuss her book from noon to 1 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, in Rice Library Room 0017. Chen attended Harvard University and the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and completed her surgical training at Yale University, the National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health), and UCLA, where she was named Outstanding Physician of the Year in 1999. Her first nationally published piece, “Dead Enough? The Paradox of Brain Death,” appeared in the fall 2005 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review and she was a finalist for the 2006 National Magazine Award. She is a recipient of the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction and Yale University’s George Longstreth Humanness Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 James Kirkwood Prize in Creative Writing. She lives near Boston with her husband and children. Chen’s visit to USI is sponsored by the Vista Care Hospice Foundation in memory of Evelyn and Leonard Lottes. Students are encouraged to attend. She will be available to sign copies of her book after the program. |
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