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University Communications

University of Richmond, Bon Secours Co-Sponsoring Lecture Series on Illness and Death

September 18, 2006

Bon Secours Richmond Health System and the University of Richmond will co-sponsor a series of six lectures on the psychological and existential-moral issues surrounding mortal illness and death.

Called “Medicine, Mortality and Meaning: Perspectives on Illness and Dying,” the series is funded by Bon Secours Richmond and the university’s Richmond Quest. Bon Secours Hospice operates Richmond’s oldest and only non-profit hospice program.

Series topics will include the perspectives of health care professionals who work closely with the dying and their families, as well as images and perspectives presented through literature and the visual arts. 

Each lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Jepson Alumni Center’s Robins Pavilion with the exception of “Talking to the Dying, Reports from the Front,” which will be held in the Alice Haynes Room in Tyler Haynes Commons. The lectures are free and open to the public.

The series includes the following:

  • “Literature and Mortality,” Oct. 25, with Arnold Weinstein, professor of comparative literature at Brown University and a well-known lecturer and writer on how serious literature can help us understand and come to terms with the experience of mortal illness and death.

  • “Mortal Politics: J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron,” Nov. 13, with David Attwell, professor of modern literature at the University of York (United Kingdom) and an authority on the work of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Attwell will focus on a dying person’s need to experience a positive sense of connection to a family and to larger human communities.
  • “Nothing Left Unsaid: Creating a Healing Legacy with Final Words,” Nov. 28 with Mary Polce-Lynch, a Richmond psychologist, who will lecture on the topic of her recent book. She will explain the value of writing personal letters to loved ones for reading after the writer’s death.

  • “Edvard Munch and Sickness as the Rudder of Life and Art,” Jan. 23 with  Reinhold Heller, art historian and professor at the University of Chicago, who is an authority on Munch, the modern Norwegian painter who depicts scenes of illness, pain, dying and death.

  • “Talking to the Dying: Reports from the Front,” Feb. 20. Medical professionals associated with the hospice movement in Richmond will lecture on talking with a person who is dying. (This lecture will take place in the Alice Haynes Room, Tyler Haynes Commons.)

  • “The Quest for Meaning in the Face of Suffering and Death,” April 3. Lidia Schapira and Ruth Yorkin Drazen will lecture on the career and thoughts of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and philosopher who founded a kind of psychotherapy known as logotherapy, resulting from his experiences in a World War II concentration camp. He wrote a number of influential books that offer a broad existentialist-spiritual perspective on pain, suffering and dying.   

For more information on the series, contact Ray Hilliard at (804) 289-8289 or rhilliar@richmond.edu.