Speaker – Stephen Sonnenberg<\/p>\n
While a student at Princeton in the late 1950s and early 1960s Stephen Sonnenberg was influenced by the ideas of the literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and read C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution<\/em> (1959). He will explain Snow’s influence on his thinking throughout his life, as reflected in his memoir now in its third draft, which looks closely at doctor-patient exchanges. A physician and humanities scholar, Sonnenberg will further discuss how his thinking on health care has evolved and how he structures his conversation with patients. The lecture will include an explanation of how medical psychoanalysts traditionally made clinical decisions.<\/p>\n Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D., was educated at Princeton University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree in 1965. He is now Professor of Psychiatry, Population Health, and Medical Education at the Dell Medical School, as well as Professor of Instruction at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and a Fellow of the Trice Professorship in the Plan II Honors Program. Like C. P. Snow, he tries to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Stephen Sonnenberg While a student at Princeton in the late 1950s and early 1960s Stephen Sonnenberg was influenced by the ideas of the literary critic and poet R. P. Blackmur, and read C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). He will explain Snow’s influence on his thinking throughout his life, as […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/09\/19-09-06-British-Studies-Lecture-Series.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"74.6M","filesize_raw":"78227840","date_recorded":"06-09-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[238,53,236,142,235,240,239,234,233,237],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-300","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-238","6":"tag-british-studies","7":"tag-c-p-snow","8":"tag-humanities","9":"tag-r-p-blackmur","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-snow","12":"tag-sonnenberg","13":"tag-stephen","14":"tag-the-two-cultures-and-the-scientific-revolution","15":"series-bsls","16":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":802,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:15:46","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:15:46","post_content":"\n Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D., was educated at Princeton University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree in 1965. He is now Professor of Psychiatry, Population Health, and Medical Education at the Dell Medical School, as well as Professor of Instruction at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and a Fellow of the Trice Professorship in the Plan II Honors Program. Like C. P. Snow, he tries to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Stephen Sonnenberg","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"stephen-sonnenberg","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:15:46","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:15:46","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=802","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":961,"post_author":"52","post_date":"2021-01-20 20:48:57","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 20:48:57","post_content":"\n Dr. Brent Iverson became the second dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies in July 2013. Iverson was actively involved in the formation of the school, first serving on the Task Force on Curricular Reform that led to the school\u2019s creation in 2006 and then on the school\u2019s faculty governance group, the Undergraduate Studies Advisory Committee, for four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Growing up in Silicon Valley, the nation\u2019s hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, Iverson saw time and time again how ideas and individuals can change the world, if given a supportive environment. Since his appointment, Iverson has worked tirelessly to show prospective Longhorns that Undergraduate Studies is the best place for students unsure of their majors. As the school continues to grow in popularity, Iverson will focus on strengthening its unique resources to ensure that each student finds his or her collegiate calling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before he became dean, Iverson was chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where he holds the Warren J. and Viola Mae Raymer Professorship. He has co-authored eight editions of an organic chemistry textbook used at universities across the country. He is well known across campus for teaching an immensely popular undergraduate organic chemistry course, a task he continues to perform each fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iverson has received numerous awards in recognition of his contributions in the classroom. In 2013, he was elected inaugural president of the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers established by the Board of Regents. In 2011, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Other honors include being elected into the Texas Philosophical Society in 2016, the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award (2013), the Margaret C. Berry Award for contributions to UT student life (2012), the UT Board of Regents Outstanding Teacher Award (2011), the American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award (2005), the Jean Holloway Teaching Award (2001), the UT Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers (1999), and the Friars Centennial teaching award (1995). He has served on the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement Board of Directors since 2008, and this year he joined the Camp Kesem National Board of Directors, an international charity that sends kids of cancer patients to summer camp for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iverson also maintains an active research lab. Major projects include the development of technologies that will enable the creation of next-generation biotherapeutics, investigation of a new class of molecules that bind to long stretches of DNA, and creation of synthetic molecules that clarify the factors responsible for amyloid fibril formation, one of the characteristic features of Alzheimer\u2019s disease. He is an inventor on 23 issued U.S. patents, many of which have been licensed and generate income for The University of Texas at Austin. Working with George Georgiou and Jennifer Maynard of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Iverson helped develop an FDA-approved late-stage cure for exposure to anthrax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dean Iverson received his bachelor\u2019s degree in chemistry from Stanford University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1987. He completed his postdoctoral work at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Brent L. Iverson","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"brent-l-iverson","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 20:48:57","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 20:48:57","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=961","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" We’re very glad to see such a good turnout. I’m not quite sure whether it’s because of Dr. Sonnenberg or because<\/p>\n the subject is C.P. Snow, but anyway,<\/p>\n C.P. Snow himself participated in some of the early sessions of British studies.<\/p>\n This was back in the late 1970s when we used to meet over in the Mosley<\/p>\n ROOM. We were a much more cozy group then than we are now.<\/p>\n And we found C.P. Snow to be very congenial, very willing to purchase split and discussion, to take<\/p>\n criticism, to offer his own views. Colorful use.<\/p>\n Doug Marr remembers him because he always wore red socks to<\/p>\n the dean of undergraduate studies. Brant Iverson, was his bread here?<\/p>\n Well, you’re supposed to be introducing our speaker. So would you like to come up, Brant?<\/p>\n So many people know who Dr. Sonnenberg is.<\/p>\n How do people do not? OK. I would have to say that I’ve known Dr. Sonnenberg<\/p>\n for four years. So I think I know all of that.<\/p>\n He’s one of the most remarkable people I have met because of his breadth of the things that he does.<\/p>\n And he came to me as a dance school graduate, studies with a concept for a new bridging disciplines<\/p>\n program. The only problem with virtually everything he talked about, it had to be<\/p>\n created from scratch scraps and get a lot of input from a lot of different people and a lot of excitement from a lot<\/p>\n of different people. So I said, that sounds like a fantastic idea. I’ll help support your thinking.<\/p>\n No one human being can pull this off. And so Dr. Sonnenberg comes to us with<\/p>\n a credible background and Madison in psychology, but really<\/p>\n just in being our overall smart person. I don’t know how else to say it.<\/p>\n And what has been amazing to me, this one person has pulled together people from all over campus,<\/p>\n very indispensable programs for undergraduates that are thinking about how they’re going to combine<\/p>\n a liberal arts type of critical analysis and thinking with Madison. This is so long overdue.<\/p>\n And I’m completely indebted to Dr. Steinberg for being able to pull this off because it takes<\/p>\n a heroic effort. You have actually done this. And so we are about to see<\/p>\n this launch. It’s going to be coming very soon. And I don’t want to advertise that<\/p>\n program other than to say it was an amazing effort by somebody who I have incredible respect for.<\/p>\n So without it, by way of introduction. Thank you, Grant.<\/p>\n Thank you very much, worth of share for you.<\/p>\n Dr. Sonnenberg, thank you. And<\/p>\n thank you, Brant. That was really very kind of, you know, as usual, my wife<\/p>\n of 56 years has declined to attend<\/p>\n talk I’m giving because she’s heard it all so many times.<\/p>\n That’s the truth. And but now that this has been audiotaped,<\/p>\n I can make her listen to it. So this is good.<\/p>\n Now, I. Going gonna go very fast because I want to do this in 50<\/p>\n minutes is a lot to say. And there are people here<\/p>\n who I talk about and they may want to comment after<\/p>\n the talk is over. And we do want to have time for questions and answers. So<\/p>\n bear with me. I’m going to try to do this quickly in order to understand this talk.<\/p>\n You need to understand that there are five themes<\/p>\n or goals, all of which intersect. But I want to just tell you what each of them<\/p>\n is. So this will make sense to you. First of all, this talk is<\/p>\n based on a memoir. Now, the memoir has been a book that’s<\/p>\n been in gestation for more than a decade. It didn’t start out to be a memoir,<\/p>\n but I will on September the 23rd, I will be closer to my 80th<\/p>\n birthday than my seventy ninth. So I thought, OK, now’s the time.<\/p>\n I will I will do this memoir. The talk also<\/p>\n reflects a theme that runs through the history of psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n And also it could be called a personal autobiographical<\/p>\n oral narrative history. Now, in fact, from a psychoanalytic<\/p>\n perspective, those those two terms or the long description<\/p>\n and the term psychoanalytic are really synonymous. So just to put this in historical<\/p>\n perspective, one of Freud’s greatest discoveries came<\/p>\n as a result of his self-analysis. He had analyzed a woman<\/p>\n named Irma. It didn’t succeed. He met a colleague who<\/p>\n informed him that the patient who had finished the treatment against<\/p>\n his advice was not doing well, and he had a dream that is referred to in<\/p>\n the dream book. In the end, the interpretation of dreams<\/p>\n as the dream of Irma’s injection and Freud self analyzed<\/p>\n his own dream. And he used that self analysis to define what he considered<\/p>\n to be the purpose of dreams, which was to fulfill wishes. And he was very open<\/p>\n in the dream book. This is my dream. Someone who was less open, but also<\/p>\n autobiographical. Was Heintz cohort who really changed the direction<\/p>\n of psychoanalysis by inventing self psychology. Now, the reason<\/p>\n he invented it is he had had a very unsuccessful analysis with a very famous<\/p>\n analyst and he was not happy about it. He had become a major figure<\/p>\n in psychoanalytic thought, and eventually he wrote about and talked about<\/p>\n the second analysis of Mr. Z. Now, he didn’t explicitly<\/p>\n tell the world that he was Mr. Z, but in fact he was<\/p>\n Mr. C, and he had analyzed himself, engaged in a great deal of self-reflection<\/p>\n to create a healing narrative that had not been created in his first analysis.<\/p>\n These are just two examples. And many analysts will tell you that the greatest discoveries<\/p>\n in the field come from self-reflection. Certainly in<\/p>\n in a tradition of Plato and Socrates that Paul Woodroofe always<\/p>\n talks about. So you’re hearing something personal and<\/p>\n this is at least part of my discipline’s tradition. It’s also an intellectual<\/p>\n historical narrative because it really brings into focus<\/p>\n the power of an idea. Everything you will hear today<\/p>\n reflects the influence that CPS snowed had on me when<\/p>\n I was a junior and senior in college, which was right after his 1959<\/p>\n ready. lecture. There was a man at Princeton where I was an undergraduate, R.P.<\/p>\n Blackmer, a critic and a poet and super intellectual. And<\/p>\n he talked about snow all the time. Now, in my years at Princeton, the typical<\/p>\n pre-med did not major in science. For one one thing, there wasn’t nearly as much science<\/p>\n to learn as undergraduates as there is today. But in addition, we were really<\/p>\n encouraged to major in the humanities. So here we were,<\/p>\n about 100 young men in a class of 700, all men<\/p>\n about to embark on medical school. And we were hearing about C.P. Snow all the<\/p>\n time. And that certainly fit into the undergraduate tradition that I experienced at<\/p>\n Princeton. I majored in history.<\/p>\n So Snowe’s ideas were extremely important to me. They reinforced<\/p>\n ideas that I was experiencing all the time. And I’m going to talk more about that.<\/p>\n The notion that science and the humanities that scientists<\/p>\n and humanities scholars had to work together to solve the major problems of the world<\/p>\n was very clear to snow, and he particularly was concerned with<\/p>\n certain problems. He was concerned with disparities. He<\/p>\n was concerned with nuclear war. He was concerned with overpopulation.<\/p>\n He saw no way these could be solved if people from both fields couldn’t work<\/p>\n together in the sample evidence that he was right. Now, finally<\/p>\n or not, finally. But I also want to say that this talk is an educational commentary<\/p>\n because it shows the impact on me.<\/p>\n Of involved teachers and mentors. Encouraging<\/p>\n me to feel comfortable working on the cusp of my own discipline,<\/p>\n which I know, and other disciplines which I don’t. One of<\/p>\n the one of the things I think we are really emphasizing here<\/p>\n at Yuichi is encouraging students to be interdisciplinary.<\/p>\n And this was certainly, certainly something that you’re going to hear all about<\/p>\n today. And it’s certainly something that that is very, very important to me. On<\/p>\n a personal level as well as in my role as a teacher. So<\/p>\n and this kind of work really requires nurturance and mentoring.<\/p>\n And I’ll say more about that. But you’re going to hear about that. I also want to say one<\/p>\n other thing, too. Not not so much to the students, but to the the<\/p>\n older people in the room, many of whom are faculty members. I think at this<\/p>\n university, at its best, we mentor each other. We nurture each other. And I<\/p>\n think that’s how we learn. And there are people in this room who have done that for me,<\/p>\n and I hope I have reciprocated. So you’re going to hear about that in the talk.<\/p>\n And finally, this talk is about a naturalistic<\/p>\n experiment. Now, I am trained as a researcher, as<\/p>\n a as a quantitative researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. But I have<\/p>\n chosen to do non quantitative research. I’m very interested in research<\/p>\n that that allows for the development of hypotheses and not and not just in the humanities,<\/p>\n but in the relationship of the humanities and the sciences within medicine.<\/p>\n So what what what writing this book and preparing this<\/p>\n lecture actually constitute is a naturalistic experiment<\/p>\n that leads to a kind of hypothesis which I hope we will test further.<\/p>\n And you’ll hear about that now. In order to understand<\/p>\n this, there’s a little bit of a prolog here.<\/p>\n First of all, I’m going to tell you the title of the book that<\/p>\n that that that began very differently, which is the really the<\/p>\n foundation of this talk. And this is the title Ten New Commandments<\/p>\n of Doctor Patient Communication and Health Care Practice.<\/p>\n And on a lighter note, the subtitle is A Doctor’s Adventure of Discovery<\/p>\n at an American Research University. And that is autobiographical. Now, when<\/p>\n Roger asked me to do this talk. He said, well, send me a blurb that we<\/p>\n can send out. Now, I want to read you the blurb that I sent to him. I think that’s,<\/p>\n again, going to be informative about what you’re hearing. My title<\/p>\n was R.P. Blackmer, C.P. Snow. And what I learned<\/p>\n after my sixty ninth birthday at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/p>\n And this was what my. Too many words. But<\/p>\n this is what I sent him. Steve Sonnenberg, a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst<\/p>\n who spent the last 10 years writing a book about health care as he has learned<\/p>\n more and more as a faculty member at our university, the structure of the book and its narrative<\/p>\n have changed. The book began as an issue of a psychoanalytic journal<\/p>\n when it was to be a collection of essays discussing how psycho and psychoanalysts make clinical<\/p>\n decisions. But I will describe how during this last<\/p>\n decade, I developed deeply important relationships with several U.T. faculty<\/p>\n members who influenced me to continuously and alternating Lee<\/p>\n look backwards and I mean backwards in time, forwards in time and<\/p>\n also inward and in the end. This book is<\/p>\n kind of a personal history, a memoir that traces the development<\/p>\n of my thinking about health care starting during my pre-medical studies.<\/p>\n Now I’m going to I don’t think I need to go on with<\/p>\n this description because I’m going to cover that<\/p>\n ground in the rest of the talk. But the the<\/p>\n description you got much shorter and I think less personal, but nevertheless,<\/p>\n it got you here. Well, you know that and I don’t I don’t need to.<\/p>\n Go over it. So now I want to issue an apology in advance.<\/p>\n Some of you came expecting a talk where I would mention C.P. Snow<\/p>\n over and over again. I actually think every word reflects<\/p>\n the influence that that had on me. And again, I want to. I wouldn’t really want to stress this.<\/p>\n The power of of an idea can be life changing. And this is something<\/p>\n that we can do for our students. And this is something that the students in the room<\/p>\n really should be looking for. Look for those. It doesn’t have to be a single text. But look<\/p>\n for those texts that change your life. And they do exist.<\/p>\n And the ready lecture is not very long changed mine.<\/p>\n So I said this is a net. This this memoir is a naturalistic<\/p>\n experiment and involves the breaking down of silos.<\/p>\n That’s possible at a research university like this where one<\/p>\n can find a great deal of nourishment and mentoring. And I can’t<\/p>\n emphasize how important that is. So the talk is about the<\/p>\n evolution of a book from a psychoanalytic decision<\/p>\n making issue of the journal into a book that<\/p>\n really talks about breaking silos and mentoring. So I was<\/p>\n on the editorial board of this journal. One of my former teachers was the editor<\/p>\n in chief. And he made the mistake of saying to me, I want you<\/p>\n to put together an issue of the book on psychoanalytic decision making.<\/p>\n I recruited 10 psychoanalysts to write essays and then I realized I<\/p>\n really didn’t want to edit that issue of the journal.<\/p>\n So I I passive aggressively let it lie long<\/p>\n enough because I knew that these people who had agreed to to write for<\/p>\n for me were very busy and they were going to pretty soon have other<\/p>\n things to do. And they were going to forget that that I even asked them, which none of them<\/p>\n did. But when I finally got around several years later is saying, well, are you still interested? I<\/p>\n breathe a sigh of relief when they said, no, no, not not anymore. I’m too busy.<\/p>\n And that allowed me then to reread crute, a different group. There were a couple from<\/p>\n the original group, and I’ll tell you later who they were. So<\/p>\n then. Again, the book, the talk,<\/p>\n the the the message I have is about<\/p>\n how to learn how to break barriers, how to break silos,<\/p>\n how to receive and give mentoring and the value of that in<\/p>\n promoting learning at the university. And<\/p>\n I’ve already mentioned C.P. Snow and his three great problems.<\/p>\n I just want you to keep that in mind. Disparities, overpopulation,<\/p>\n nuclear war. In nineteen<\/p>\n fifty nine, when I encountered snow,<\/p>\n there actually wasn’t a lot of talk in the academy about<\/p>\n working in more than one discipline. In fact,<\/p>\n the department’s system that we’re very familiar with for all of its strengths and all<\/p>\n of its weaknesses ruled the day. That’s the way people<\/p>\n operated. And there was this guy out<\/p>\n in California who would write on the American Psychoanalytic<\/p>\n Listserv about the value of working in two<\/p>\n disciplines, one of which was your area of expertise. The other of which<\/p>\n was something that you were just learning about. And you dared to declare<\/p>\n that you weren’t an expert in that other field and develop<\/p>\n a relationship with a text, with texts and learn.<\/p>\n And, you know, I think one of the interesting things about.<\/p>\n Knowing a scholar who who you have a personal<\/p>\n relationship with and whose work you then read creates<\/p>\n a very interesting experience in your own mind because<\/p>\n you actually have a conversation with that scholar. You don’t just read what she<\/p>\n wrote, what he wrote, what they wrote, you you read and you absorb<\/p>\n and you imagine a conversation that you’re having with that other person, with that nourishing<\/p>\n source. With that mentoring source. And you actually experience a conversation<\/p>\n as you study. And of course, if you’re here where we really do have a university<\/p>\n community, you even then have the advantage of going to that person and discussing<\/p>\n your ideas and discussing their ideas and developing together a new<\/p>\n set of ideas. And that kind of a dialectical process, that kind of an innovative,<\/p>\n creative process is extremely important and we need to do<\/p>\n more of it. And I will say that<\/p>\n the School of Undergraduate Studies and the bridging disciplines programs and<\/p>\n the signature course programs really speak to that in a very, very<\/p>\n special way. So.<\/p>\n On the Web site, Pilo Enberg wrote about how<\/p>\n new ideas emerged when people worked on the cusp<\/p>\n of two fields. That’s not my phrase. That’s his. And<\/p>\n I didn’t know him, but I decided I was going to get to know him<\/p>\n and as soon as I could, which was 2005 when a conference<\/p>\n on the relationship of architecture and psychoanalysis took place<\/p>\n here. And I’ll say more about that when I had the opportunity to work<\/p>\n on putting that conference together. I. I saw it. I<\/p>\n made sure that he was one of the invitees and one of the<\/p>\n invitees to write an essay in the book when I<\/p>\n reconfigured it. Now.<\/p>\n Let me let me tell you<\/p>\n about the memoir again. It’s<\/p>\n it’s not a typical memoir. First of all, there<\/p>\n are 10 essays by eleven really, really generous<\/p>\n contributors, one of whom is as is louis’<\/p>\n and. I’m going to say something about<\/p>\n Louise’s contribution. Louise Weinberg’s contribution in a little while.<\/p>\n But in order to understand my relationship to C.P. Snow,<\/p>\n my relationship to this book as it evolved, this<\/p>\n a typical memoir which includes 10 contributions from eleven other people.<\/p>\n I want you to I want to read to you a letter that I wrote to<\/p>\n President Fenris and Provost McGinness at the time of the Fine Arts<\/p>\n Library crisis. Now, who here knows about the<\/p>\n fine art? Who here doesn’t know about the fine arts library crisis? Oh, well,<\/p>\n I will tell you about the fine arts library crisis.<\/p>\n One day. People on the faculty became aware<\/p>\n that a proposal was made to ship a large number<\/p>\n of fabulous fine arts volumes to a depository<\/p>\n somewhere near College Station. Students would be able to get them.<\/p>\n They simply would have to say that they wanted them and request<\/p>\n them, then presumably within a week or so they would get them. Now,<\/p>\n you know, I don’t know if anybody here is in our history, Major, but can<\/p>\n you imagine what is lost when an art history major doesn’t have access<\/p>\n to stacks filled with books, with buit with beautiful images in them? And<\/p>\n that student can’t go through those stacks and have adventures of discovery all<\/p>\n the time? No, I have to know what I want and I have to ask for it. Well, so<\/p>\n Steve Hall sure was the chairman of American Studies at the time. And<\/p>\n he he and I had gotten to know each other and I had become an affiliate member of his faculty.<\/p>\n And I discussed an idea I had with him because they were soliciting letters from faculty<\/p>\n members to protest this. And when when Steven I talked,<\/p>\n he said, you know, write that and and we’ll see what we’ll decide<\/p>\n to do with it. And what he decided to do was to have me send it to the president and to the provost,<\/p>\n along with with other letters. But I think this says a lot about C.P.<\/p>\n Snow and me. And some very, very<\/p>\n nurturant, nourishing, nourishing mentors that I had as an undergraduate.<\/p>\n Here’s the letter I’m writing because my own life was changed by an experience with a real book<\/p>\n which I read, held, touched and looked at repeatedly and related<\/p>\n to so magically, viscerally. So already, you know, you should be able<\/p>\n here in this if you’re a doctor. You would be sure of it. When I start talking<\/p>\n about the visceral and the somatic, I’m talking about medical science. And when I talk about<\/p>\n the experience of reading, I’m talking about something that has more to do with the mind and the brain.<\/p>\n That’s where the humanities come in. When I learned of the effort to remove<\/p>\n books from the Fine Arts Library and store them in an off campus location, I felt concern.<\/p>\n As an undergraduate, I explored the open stacks of my university’s library, pulled books<\/p>\n off the shelves, had unexpected adventures with them and discovered so much about<\/p>\n the world in myself. I was also motivated by that experience to purchase<\/p>\n hard copies of many books so I could hold them and read them without concern<\/p>\n for a library return date. And marked them up now. One adventure<\/p>\n stands out. I was 20 years old when I first read Melville<\/p>\n and I was privileged to have as my professor, the legendary Larry Holland.<\/p>\n He was my lecturer and he was my seminar teacher. The course I was taking<\/p>\n was very advanced undergraduate English majors. It was like organic chemistry for<\/p>\n pre-medical students. It was the one you took to prove you were on the right track<\/p>\n if you aspired to a career as a literary scholar. And parenthetically, one of my<\/p>\n classmates became the chair of the English Department at Harvard. I don’t think he got an A in the course.<\/p>\n I think he got an A-minus. It was a really tough course.<\/p>\n So I was a history major and a pre-med as well. And I hadn’t taken<\/p>\n an English course since I studied Shakespeare under the guidance of Alan<\/p>\n Downer as a freshman. And one good friend who went on to a very distinguished career as<\/p>\n a Victorian scholar dared me to take the course. And I think that propelled me to do it<\/p>\n now in the book. I may say a little bit more about. There may be people in this room who know<\/p>\n him. And he was always very arrogant. And so, you know, he dared me and well,<\/p>\n what could I do? You know, I took the course, but he did have. He’s retired<\/p>\n now, a very, very distinguished career. Under Howard’s instruction, I became passionate<\/p>\n about Faulkner, James Twain and Melville and explored the library stacks<\/p>\n focusing on that, on those four writers being and the thoughtful reader.<\/p>\n I purchased many books so I can own them and mark them up when it came to<\/p>\n write the major essay that the course being a slow reader. I chose a short<\/p>\n story Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. As time passed,<\/p>\n I really dug into that story, turning pages forward and back,<\/p>\n reading sentences over and over, trying to figure out what it was<\/p>\n about. In those days and this was spring semester 1961,<\/p>\n my last in college students like me and I was not unique in my class.<\/p>\n We were like this. We did not run to the summaries of literature that might have been<\/p>\n available. We tried to come up with unique perspectives on what we were reading.<\/p>\n I wrote a first draft of an essay about the story, but even with Holland’s<\/p>\n critique of my draft, I felt lost. In fact, I believe<\/p>\n Holland wanted me to feel lost because he was at odds with Laurence Thompson,<\/p>\n his respected English department colleague and friend, over the nature of Melville’s<\/p>\n view of God. I think Colin wanted all his students to feel<\/p>\n confused by competing theories about Melville and develop their own points<\/p>\n of view. But as I work to understand Bartleby, I didn’t know that, at least<\/p>\n not until the close to the close to the very end of my effort.<\/p>\n So I remember looking at the increasingly grimy pages of my edition of Melville<\/p>\n short stories. The color changed by the sweat and dirt<\/p>\n that came off my fingers as I worked and reworked the story.<\/p>\n What I recall is that at a certain point in time, looking at the top margin<\/p>\n of a page, I saw the word job.<\/p>\n I was young and not all that self-reflective.<\/p>\n He knows something about me. I was a rugby player<\/p>\n and I. I didn’t ask myself how that form of visual<\/p>\n imagining had occurred. But while I knew that word was not printed<\/p>\n on the page in ink, but rather by my mind, I simply directly<\/p>\n and enthusiastically embraced what I had seen and started to think about what it meant.<\/p>\n Now I have to also emphasized that before college I had not spent a lot of time<\/p>\n studying the Old and New Testaments, and until just then I hadn’t thought at all about<\/p>\n the book of Jobe. That is, I want to emphasize until then,<\/p>\n and I really ran with Jobe and Job. I knew Melville<\/p>\n was very engaged in inquiry about the nature of God and that Holland was engaged<\/p>\n in an inquiry exploring just what Melville thought about God.<\/p>\n At that point I went to my friend, the future Victorian scholar, feeling I had<\/p>\n something to discuss with him. And we talked about Melville. Bartleby, Thompson,<\/p>\n Holland and the competing views of two distinguished professor at two distinguished<\/p>\n professors held regarding Melville’s views on God. I wrote my<\/p>\n paper and received very warm praise from Holland for my own<\/p>\n inquiry about what the story might tell us about Melville’s view of God.<\/p>\n Holland appreciated how I had focused on a concrete aspect of the short story<\/p>\n a person’s refusal to do his job. He appreciated how, from<\/p>\n there I inferred another dimension of the story its relationship to the Book<\/p>\n of Job. Even more importantly, this experience intellectual and<\/p>\n tactile, somatic, visceral. I’d say this<\/p>\n neurological. This allowed me to make a career decision. I decided I wanted<\/p>\n to go to medical school because I had learned something about physical human experience<\/p>\n handling that book over and over again. There was something I<\/p>\n wanted to learn about the human body and what it can teach us. I came to think<\/p>\n that there was a relationship between mind, brain and body that I wanted to explore.<\/p>\n I wanted to know more about how my own mind and body had work to create that experience<\/p>\n with a book that appearance of a word on a page I was touching and<\/p>\n looking at. That told me so much about a short story. The next year I started<\/p>\n medical school and discovered psychiatry in psychoanalysis. I realized that I<\/p>\n had a special attraction to words and they’re different, often hidden meanings.<\/p>\n These words might come in the form of free associations by a patient in psychoanalysis<\/p>\n or in the form of what a participant observer might generate as an imaginary capital.<\/p>\n J. Became a lowercase J. And then back again in my mind’s eye,<\/p>\n removing books and placing them in the depository and depriving students of the opportunity<\/p>\n to handle them is throwing out the baby with the bathwater looked at within the framework<\/p>\n of a research university. I personally think it is almost like burning books.<\/p>\n It is disrespectful of the art and craft of writing and creating a book and using<\/p>\n it in the service of scholarship and teaching. Finally, for the record,<\/p>\n I appreciate the value of the computer because they wanted to digitalize all these books.<\/p>\n I know it is very useful in academic teambuilding. I know it has many<\/p>\n advantages as a tool in the hands of scholars who perform valuable<\/p>\n research and teach and students who learn. I know did utilizing books,<\/p>\n photographs, paintings has enormous value today. In fact,<\/p>\n it allowed me to download Bartleby the Scrivener and run a word check<\/p>\n just to be sure. Neither job nor Jobe appears<\/p>\n in the text. And then there was a if I can be of further service.<\/p>\n Now, if you can’t hear snow in that<\/p>\n and appreciate that now at nearly 80,<\/p>\n then at nearly 21, that those ideas<\/p>\n really were were formative, foundational<\/p>\n in my thinking and in the way I’ve lived my life. And I’m talking here about<\/p>\n the way I live my life on this campus. But it’s also the way<\/p>\n I live my personal life. Now, I want<\/p>\n to talk here about catalyst’s and enzymes.<\/p>\n I wasn’t sure you were going to come, but I figured, you know. So I’m going to tell you about three,<\/p>\n actually. You know? I actually think they’re enzymes, not<\/p>\n catalyst’s. I mean, the enzymes have a catalytic function, but<\/p>\n they’re different. So I know a little science. I’m going to<\/p>\n be careful. And I know I’m going to get graded on this. So I’m I’m trying very hard.<\/p>\n First, Elizabeth danzy, who is the interim dean of the School of Architecture, who would be here, but<\/p>\n she’s with students in Europe. She and I met because I<\/p>\n was submitting an essay to a book in psychoanalytic annual volume that she was guest<\/p>\n editing. And we conceived of the Space in Mind conference<\/p>\n in into 0 5. We the conference was held in 2 0 7. And<\/p>\n eventually we created space and psyche, which Fritz<\/p>\n Steiner, the former dean of the School of Architecture, says is the most says it is the most beautiful<\/p>\n book he has ever seen. And I’m just telling you that I’m very proud of it. And<\/p>\n I’m very proud of the work Elizabeth and I did together. And she was the enzyme,<\/p>\n the the the book. I was responsible for the text. She<\/p>\n was responsible for the images. And we work together. And it’s won several awards, especially because<\/p>\n of its design. But we did something else that was particularly unique. We encountered<\/p>\n the model of development, Erick Erickson, who’d been analyzed by Anna<\/p>\n Freud. He had no p_h_d_ a fact he’d only gone to school. I think is a Montessori<\/p>\n teacher, but he was a professor at Harvard and an Erickson<\/p>\n had created this model of human development. And he himself said<\/p>\n this shouldn’t just be two dimensional on the printed page. But it was<\/p>\n so Elizabeth and I decided we were going to create a three dimensional models so we could better appreciate<\/p>\n the relationship of development at different stages of life over<\/p>\n time. And if you can just imagine a three dimensional model, it really<\/p>\n it really depicts time in a way that you can see in a very concrete<\/p>\n way. So we thought we could do this in two weeks. It took us three years, but<\/p>\n we did eventually presented it some scientific meetings. We got an eye Arby approval to use<\/p>\n it in working with students at the university to assess their own development in the course<\/p>\n of courses we were teaching together. And and the article<\/p>\n about it was published that we wrote, which was published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.<\/p>\n But during that process, I realized something more vividly than I ever had before.<\/p>\n That I had been trained to think in very linear,<\/p>\n exclusively linear ways by various authoritarian<\/p>\n teachers using a very positive list, almost 19th<\/p>\n century model, and that hadn’t changed much. When I was learning to be a psychoanalyst,<\/p>\n when I was learning to be a doctor, and I if we had two hours, I could give you some vivid<\/p>\n illustrations. And what my relationship with Elizabeth did,<\/p>\n and this is really remarkable. It changed the way I saw it.<\/p>\n Because she taught me to to think. In relationship to time<\/p>\n in different ways, and I have to use spatial models<\/p>\n to describe this process. She taught me to think in circles.<\/p>\n She taught me to think in in in spheres. She<\/p>\n taught me to think in swirls. She taught me to think like a helix and not a<\/p>\n straight line. Just to put this into perspective,<\/p>\n I was finishing college and starting medical school<\/p>\n when Watson and Crick told us about the structure of<\/p>\n DNA, the double helix. And I can tell you that the notion<\/p>\n of a double helix was was all abroad.<\/p>\n Was was greeted with wonder and all by people in science.<\/p>\n By the way, just for the record, and I can’t remember her name, but they never gave<\/p>\n credit to the woman they worked with. Who was it? Who was it?<\/p>\n Yeah. Thank you. And of course, they wouldn’t have done it without her, and I would<\/p>\n not think this way were not for Elizabeth. But I mean,<\/p>\n we were wowed by the idea of the double helix.<\/p>\n And that, I think, speaks to the fact that we were really trained to think so linearly. And<\/p>\n that has its disadvantages. It’s it is it’s restrictive. And<\/p>\n if this lecture seems to be moving around in different directions, I hope it doesn’t.<\/p>\n But it’s because I don’t think as linear as linearly<\/p>\n as I used to that I have more than one way of thinking. Now, I also want to talk about<\/p>\n somebody who’s in the room. And I will not embarrass you, Pauline. But Polly Strong,<\/p>\n the director of the Humanities Institute and a very, very distinguished cultural<\/p>\n anthropologist and expert in Native Americans and women and gender studies,<\/p>\n took me under her wing. I was at first a guest fellow at the Humanities Institute because<\/p>\n I had an appointment at Baylor Medical College. And eventually our relationship<\/p>\n grew and I became the first fellow in residence in the Humanities Institute.<\/p>\n And I’ll tell you what you taught me, Polly, because you are a consummate<\/p>\n scholar, but you are also a public intellectual.<\/p>\n You are a very committed person committed to using your knowledge,<\/p>\n not just to write a wonderful book that I know that I’ve read, but but also<\/p>\n to change the world. Now, psychoanalysis, even though Freud, of course, was<\/p>\n very much attention getter, psychoanalysis<\/p>\n taught us that we shouldn’t even give a talk to the PTA.<\/p>\n We were supposed to be anonymous. We were supposed to be very secretive behind<\/p>\n a screen. So and that was my field and that’s how I was trained.<\/p>\n And since I was trained to think in very linear ways, I certainly didn’t think about<\/p>\n having a major influence, major public presence. But<\/p>\n in the in the seminar and Dave Edwards was there, we studied intellectual life at moments<\/p>\n of crisis. And I actually learned that there was such a thing as a public<\/p>\n intellectual sub. Subsequently, I learned there was such a thing as medical humanities.<\/p>\n And actually, as a result of all this, Art Markman once came up to me and said,<\/p>\n you know, you have a life’s work and your life’s work is to blend humanities and science,<\/p>\n to fix a broken health care system and teach this to the next generation of<\/p>\n of of future health care providers. And this is all part of the Yuichi<\/p>\n community. So, Polly, I realized that I had been working in<\/p>\n medical humanities for decades, that the field had no name. There was no organization<\/p>\n to bring us together. But a long, long time ago, I wrote a paper<\/p>\n pointing out that Hamlet did not suffer from an edit this complex. He had post-traumatic<\/p>\n stress disorder. This this was this was heresy. But of course, I was right<\/p>\n as he did not. Not not always. But that time. So thank you, Polly.<\/p>\n And finally, Brant Iverson, who really is an<\/p>\n educational visionary. And I will tell you that, you know, you talk about how sometimes<\/p>\n I’m walking around that track late at night all by myself. Well, you’ve<\/p>\n been my partner, and that is very important to me. And that’s mentoring.<\/p>\n So the book, The Talk, all of this is<\/p>\n about culture at the university. A culture that produces<\/p>\n ideas. Now.<\/p>\n I’m going to lie. I can’t do all this. What I’m going to tell you is, is<\/p>\n that I have come up. As a result of those essays,<\/p>\n those 10 essays with 10 new commandments<\/p>\n of patient doctor communication and health care practice,<\/p>\n now only one person who submitted an essay has been exposed<\/p>\n to the way I used their essay because it’s not what they intended.<\/p>\n And that’s Mike Starr Byrd, who I happened to see at lunch today. Not entirely<\/p>\n by chance. And because we’re on a committee together and along with with the British studies lunch.<\/p>\n That committee was meeting. So I popped over there at the end and figured I’d better get an<\/p>\n idea about how Stauber would feel about what I did with his essay. And he he he thought<\/p>\n it was OK. So I’m just gonna talk about Louise Weinberg’s essay.<\/p>\n Now by the book, you<\/p>\n can read all about all of them. But I’ll tell you about Louise. Louise<\/p>\n has a secret ambition. I know this. She really wants to be a mystery<\/p>\n writer. You<\/p>\n won’t deny that, will you? And she wrote a wonderful,<\/p>\n wonderful paper for this book, which I was supposed<\/p>\n to use to talk about decision making in<\/p>\n different fields. And she talked about Supreme<\/p>\n Court Judge Justice McReynolds, who was a cantankerous guy.<\/p>\n And and he he did he made a decision that nobody could<\/p>\n understand. It was a mystery. But Louise<\/p>\n solved the mystery in this paper. Now, I also, by the way, happen to have used<\/p>\n Sherlock Holmes in one of my medical humanities papers to talk about high functioning addicts.<\/p>\n CONAN Doyle also was a mystery writer<\/p>\n and a doctor. And so I you know, I am very interested<\/p>\n in mysteries. But here’s the seventh commandment of doctor patient communication<\/p>\n and health care practice. Investigate a mystery.<\/p>\n Every clinical encounter is a mystery. Every patient is<\/p>\n hard to understand. Empathy is a skill which must be continuously<\/p>\n practiced and honed in every clinical encounter.<\/p>\n You must see yourself as an explorer of new territory.<\/p>\n Can you put up with that, Louise? Thank you.<\/p>\n Well, that’s what I did with the nine other essays, too, so I’m going to bring this to<\/p>\n a close because I’ve actually got about four minutes.<\/p>\n Now let’s go back to snow. And by the way, you were<\/p>\n promised that I would tell you about how psychoanalysts thought and made decisions. And what I’ve tried to convey<\/p>\n is that they were by the book. They were linear. There were rules<\/p>\n of engagement. And I can tell you, the contemptuous exchanges<\/p>\n that I have witnessed take place between two psychoanalysts who had slightly<\/p>\n different basic orientations arguing about why one<\/p>\n was blasphemous because she broke the rule. And this<\/p>\n is not a great way to conduct intellectual discourse, but that<\/p>\n that that’s how I was trained. So.<\/p>\n When Snow spoke of the two cultures and the world’s great problems.<\/p>\n He listed, as I’ve said, disparities, overpopulation and nuclear war.<\/p>\n He suggested that scientists and humanities scholars need to work and think<\/p>\n together. I would add there are two more threats.<\/p>\n Two more huge problems, and one is<\/p>\n global health as a human right. There’s no there’s no such thing anymore<\/p>\n as local health. It’s all global. Germs fly on<\/p>\n planes and. If we don’t recognize<\/p>\n that health is a human right and make sure that everybody has<\/p>\n it, we are endangering the species, that may be an exaggeration. I’m not sure.<\/p>\n Maybe Jeremy, sorry, will tell us at the end whether that’s an exaggeration.<\/p>\n And the other great, great challenge is climate change. So we’ve got five now.<\/p>\n Now my experience obviously is much more mundane. But it does add a dimension,<\/p>\n and it is when a scholar in a particular field, humanities<\/p>\n or sciences. Reads in another field,<\/p>\n especially when he or she knows the creator.<\/p>\n Of the idea that she or he is studying<\/p>\n and can imaginatively elaborate on that text. Have a conversation with<\/p>\n that colleague. In one’s mind, imagine it. Think about<\/p>\n it. And then, of course, go to that colleague and talk about one’s ideas.<\/p>\n New ideas can emerge, unique ideas can emerge. This<\/p>\n is this is a more mundane version of what Snow was writing<\/p>\n about with a broad, much broader brush. And given what I’ve told you about the<\/p>\n authoritarian, linear, linear thinking in medicine, in psychoanalysis,<\/p>\n what you’ve heard is how new ideas that involve non-linear<\/p>\n thinking. Can emerge when silos are broken<\/p>\n down and mentoring occurs. So, Louise, you may<\/p>\n think, well, you know, we’ve had dinner together many times. You didn’t know you were mentoring me, but I was trying<\/p>\n to soak it in and hopefully I was successful. And<\/p>\n I say it’s non linear thinking because I am preoccupied with the health care crisis.<\/p>\n But why? When I’m reading her essay, if I’m reading it in a more conventional way, am I<\/p>\n going to translate that into something about how I think, how I deal with patients<\/p>\n and that I would call kind of think of as as thinking in<\/p>\n a swirl. Also, the<\/p>\n speak to one of Snow’s great problems.<\/p>\n Disparities. What snow refer to as disparities,<\/p>\n and today we can say good health.<\/p>\n Good, good health and health care as a human right is a fourth.<\/p>\n We can say that we can combine the notion of disparities<\/p>\n and health as a human right and recognize that we have<\/p>\n a tremendous crisis because of health care disparities.<\/p>\n So if we’re going to think about health as a human right, we have to think about health care disparities both<\/p>\n on and on the national level and on on the local level. And so that’s<\/p>\n a concrete contribution. And I do believe it, again, reflects Snowe’s<\/p>\n influence. And finally, I think the project that I’m talking about, the<\/p>\n book, has added another possibility to what can emerge from breaking down silos<\/p>\n and unexpected. So, Madoc.<\/p>\n On it. I’m sorry. An unexpected, unanticipated possibility,<\/p>\n but really a predictable possibility. With snow in mind, the idea<\/p>\n that new perspectives emerge from working on the cusp<\/p>\n of two disciplines or three or four and having the humility<\/p>\n to work in a discipline where you aren’t an expert. So I want to close<\/p>\n by thanking Roger, who really? We met a year and a half ago and he’s been very<\/p>\n kind to me and I thank you for giving me this opportunity. And they also want to mention Zachary<\/p>\n surgery now a little while ago. Jeremy Saari<\/p>\n invited me to talk about health care at his on his podcast.<\/p>\n And I had met Zachary, but I didn’t know he was a poet.<\/p>\n And at the at the podcast every week, Zachary writes a poem.<\/p>\n He’s 14 years old and he really is good. So<\/p>\n just. And at the podcast, his his poem really became<\/p>\n the the theme of what I had to say. So by chance,<\/p>\n unless you believe in a higher power. This very day,<\/p>\n I received another poem by Zachary. Sorry<\/p>\n about. Our problem with guns and<\/p>\n killings. A great poem. I think<\/p>\n in commenting on this lecture, Jeremy, I’d be interested<\/p>\n to know if you agree with the speculation of mine.<\/p>\n I think you’ve managed to. You and Alison have managed to raise<\/p>\n Zachary. Thinking out of the box, not thinking<\/p>\n linearly, I doubt as smart as you both are that you are.<\/p>\n You deal with him in an authoritarian or positive fashion. I suspect<\/p>\n you really give him a lot of space to grow and a lot of mentoring and a lot of love. And I think<\/p>\n that’s what we all have to do here at the university with each other and with<\/p>\n our students. So thank you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/300\/c-p-snow-and-the-two-cultures-of-medicine-and-the-humanities.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/300\/c-p-snow-and-the-two-cultures-of-medicine-and-the-humanities.mp3","audio_player":"