At grand rounds, sex columnist comes armed with advice

In the 1960s, Masters and Johnson moved the study of sex away from the anecdotal and into the scientific realm: they observed sexual encounters in a laboratory, monitoring brain waves, heart rates and signs of arousal. “Everything that could be measured was measured,” Ruth Westheimer, Ed.D., said during Department of Psychiatry grand rounds in September. “You may be wondering how they were able to find subjects willing to perform on demand. ... Fortunately for all of us, there were medical students who needed money,” she said, to much laughter.

“Dr. Ruth,” who has for decades dispensed her advice on the radio, in newspaper columns and in books, said that medical schools should include sexuality in their curricula. “Many of you will be ‘significant others’ for your patients when it comes to information about sexuality,” she said, adding that students should also have the opportunity to consider their own feelings about sex. For example, “Doctors can get aroused examining their patients. If you do, go out and get a glass of water—there’s no time to take a shower!—or take a deep breath. … Be aware of it but don’t get upset. If you’re aware, you can go on and ask the next question.”

—Michael Fitzsousa

Stressing the human touch in health care

When Anna Quindlen told a friend with AIDS she was giving a talk at the Yale School of Nursing, the friend said, “Tell them to treat the patient, not the file.”

Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author, did just that when she delivered the 38th annual Sybil Palmer Bellos lecture recently. She stressed the need for doctors to apply a “human touch” and credited women with pushing the health care pendulum in that direction. “We have the most astonishingly competent health care system in the world,” she said. “Now we want it to be as empathetic as it is competent.”

Quindlen spoke from experience. During her mother’s losing battle with ovarian cancer, she said, “there was no attempt on the part of her doctors to engage with her or us as people.” But times have changed as more women have entered the profession, and women, the chief health care consumers, have demanded personalized attention.

She sees parallels between journalism and health care. Newspapers diversified their content because consumers demanded it. Quindlen says her New York Times column focused on the “human experience” because that’s what she and readers found most satisfying. She’s optimistic that health care providers are finally realizing that’s what patients want, too.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Fighting assumptions about the disabled, as well as bias

People assume that the nation’s estimated 50 million disabled people live lives of grim struggle, says Harriet McBryde Johnson. That’s untrue, says Johnson, a South Carolina lawyer who uses a wheelchair because of a congenital neuromuscular disease. Such assumptions about disabled people constitute prejudice akin to racism, she said in a September talk on campus. “Our lives are interesting and rich,” said Johnson, who wants disabled people to “bear witness to our pleasures.”

Johnson garnered national attention in February 2003 with an article in The New York Times Magazine describing her conversations with Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who argues that it is ethical to kill severely disabled babies, an argument based, in part, on assumptions about quality of life. Johnson acknowledges that disabled lives, like nondisabled lives, include some suffering. She, for example, is dealing with a swallowing problem that sometimes makes her a “basket case. … But I wouldn’t say I need to be euthanized; there is much more to my life than swallowing,” said Johnson. Nor does she want to be a special case, or “a little Harriet exception” to prejudice. “I believe that living our strange, peculiar lives is a contribution, and doing it openly and without shame is really a revolutionary act.

—Cathy Shufro

On eating well, and bringing values to the table

The family meal was once the central civilizing activity in a child’s life, says Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, the trendsetting restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. She acquired her own core beliefs “almost unconsciously, at the table of my family.” Nowadays, however, families no longer give priority to the “ritual of the table,” she said in September at a colloquium sponsored by the Program in Agrarian Studies.

Waters believes public schools can help restore that daily ritual by encouraging children to grow, prepare and eat their own food and by making lunch a for-credit course. In The Edible Schoolyard, a program she helped found at a Berkeley public middle school, she says students not only find that work can be a pleasure, but also learn to think seriously about food and where it comes from, and to relate to each other in a respectful and social way. Waters wants schools nationwide to follow suit, creating “a curriculum that teaches the essential values of nourishment, community and stewardship of the land.” She said funding must be found, because unhealthy food, inactivity and the destruction wrought by factory farming carry hidden costs.

Waters has already helped to transform cuisine on the Yale campus. She’s an advisor to the Berkeley College dining hall, which last fall began serving mostly seasonal, sustainably grown foods. The menu attracts more diners than the college can serve.

—Cathy Shufro