This year's C. P. Snow Lecture will be delivered by medical ethicist Alice Dreger, who will argue that medicine today is increasingly drifting from its professional moorings as it develops ever more procedures for body modification. Dreger's talk, "Body Modification and the Future of Normal," takes place on Tuesday, April 8, at 7:00 p.m. in Textor 102. Her talk is free and open to the public.
Dreger is an associate professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on using history to improve the biomedical and social treatment of people born with socially challenging anatomies, including those born with disorders of sexual development, cranio-facial anomalies, conjoinment, and dwarfism. She examines why certain trends in U.S. medicine are alarming, including cosmetic medicine, direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, and the selling of growth hormones to normal children.
Dreger's first two books, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and the edited anthology Intersex in the Age of Ethics, both focused on the biomedical treatment of people born with atypical sex anatomies. Her most recent book, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal, received an honorary mention book award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.
In addition to speaking frequently to medical and nonmedical audiences, Dreger functions as an expert to the media and to policy makers. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and she has appeared on such television and radio outlets as the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, CNN International, and the BBC. For more information on Dreger, visit www.alicedreger.com.
The late physicist and novelist C. P. Snow was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Ithaca College in 1967. In 1959 he wrote, “Literary intellectuals at one pole -- at the other scientists, and as the most representative, physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension -- sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all, a lack of understanding." The C. P. Snow Lecture Series at Ithaca College is an attempt to bridge that gulf. For more information on the series, visit www.ithaca.edu/hs/events/series/cpsnow/currentspkr/.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20080401135913592