Bullitt Lecture on Blemished Bodies and Persons

The next joint meeting of UNC’s Bullitt History of Medicine Club and Duke’s Trent History of Medicine Society will be Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at the UNC Health Sciences Library in the 5th Floor Conference Room (527). Please join us at 5:30pm for light refreshments followed by the lecture at 6pm. Meetings are free and open to the public.

Dr. Sue Estroff, Professor of Social Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, will be presenting a lecture entitled, "Blemished Bodies and Persons: An Historical Perspective on Stigma."

Sue E. Estroff, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine, and adjunct professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her studies include: B.A., Duke University, magna cum laude, 1972; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978 (Anthropology); Post Doctoral Fellow in Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1978-1981. She joined the UNC faculty in 1982, and was Chair of the Faculty from 2000-03. In 1984, she received the Margaret Mead award from the American Anthropological Association and Society for Applied Anthropology, and she has served as past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Dr. Estroff's research areas include: individuals with chronic illness and disabilities; cultural approaches to psychosis; sociocultural factors that influence the course of psychiatric disorders; disability income policy and practice; illness narratives; moral reasoning and the production of knowledge in qualitative scholarship; reconsidering the association of violence with persons with psychiatric disorders; and complexities of consent in maternal fetal surgery. Estroff teaches medical students, supervises dissertators in the Department of Anthropology, serves on thesis committees across campus, and teaches graduate seminars in methods and ethics.

Dr. Estroff is a co-editor of The Social Medicine Reader, which is now in its second edition. Other recent publications include: ‘No Other Way to Go’ Pathways to Disability Income Among Persons with Severe, Persistent Mental Illness; Whose Story Is It Anyway: Authority, Voice, and Responsibility in Narratives of Chronic Illness; The Influence of Social Networks and Social Support on Violence by Persons with Serious Mental Illness; Risk Reconsidered: Targets of Violence in the Social Networks of People with Serious Psychiatric Disorders; The Cultural Calculus of Consent in Experimental Maternal Fetal Surger; Recognizing and Responding To Early Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis Of Individual Narratives; and From Stigma to Discrimination: An Analysis of Community Efforts to Reduce the Negative Consequences of a Psychiatric Disorder and Label.

For directions to the UNC Health Sciences Library, visit the HSL website. The Robertson Scholars Express Bus travels non-stop between UNC (Morehead Planetarium) and Duke (Chapel Circle).

For more information on the Bullitt Club, please visit the Bullitt website. Bullitt lectures for 2008-9 are now available as mp3 downloads.