Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

Lisa Olstein
Director, New Writers Project 
Faculty, Michener Center for Writers
Professor, Department of English
University of Texas at Austin

Pain Studies:
A Reading and Conversation With Author Lisa Olstein

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.