Harvard Medical School Professor to Discuss Impact of History and Culture on Medicine

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 21, 2003 — Dr. Arthur Kleinman, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology and professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and professor of social anthropology at Harvard University, will speak at Williams on Thursday, April 24. He will discuss “The Moral, the Medical, and the Political: How Medicine is Remade by History and Culture, and How It Is Threatened in Our Times.” The lecture will be held in Wege Auditorium in the Thompson Chemistry Laboratory at 7:30 p.m.

Since 1968, Kleinman has been conducting cross-cultural research on illness and health care in China and North America, and most recently has focused on violence and abuse and their moral and policy implications.

Kleinman directed the World Mental Health Report, which produced the report “World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low Income Countries” (1995), funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Milbank Fund. The report is the first review of its kind of the burden of mental illness, suicide, substance abuse, and the traumatic effects of violence in low-income societies.

He is the author of more than 150 articles and five books, and editor or co-editor of 15 volumes. He was co-editor of the issue of Daedelus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, titled “Social Suffering,” which canvassed the relation of social and health problems each other.

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Published April 21, 2003