Spring 2008 Speaker

Alice Dreger, 2008 C. P. Snow Speaker

Professor Alice Dreger
Feinberg School of Medicine,
Northwestern University

"Body Modification and the Future of Normal"

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 7pm
Textor 102

Free and Open to the Public

Professor Dreger uses history and philosophy to consider why it is that medicine today is both so unscientific and increasingly drifting from its professional moorings. Through a series of case studies -- e.g., the separation of conjoined twins, "cosmetic medicine," direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, and the selling of growth hormones to normal children -- she examines why certain trends in U.S. medicine are alarming, both from a scientific point of view and from a liberal-democratic point of view.

Biographical Information

Alice Dreger is associate professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on using history to improve the biomedical and social treatment of people born with socially challenging anatomies, including those born with disorders of sexual development, cranio-facial anomalies, conjoinment, and dwarfism. Professor Dreger frequently speaks to medical and nonmedical audiences, functions as an expert to the media and to policy makers, and advises fellow activists on how to do ethical, effective advocacy.

Dreger's first two books, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (now in its sixth printing with Harvard University Press, 1998), and the edited anthology, Intersex in the Age of Ethics (University Publishing Group, 1999), both focused on the biomedical treatment of people born with atypical sex anatomies. Her latest book, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal (Harvard University Press, 2004), has received positive reviews in the New Yorker, the New England Journal of Medicine, the London Review of Books, and Nature. It was named "book of the month" by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and received an honorary mention for the 2005 Gustavus Myers Book Award of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

Professor Dreger served as the project coordinator and editor-in-chief for the handbooks of the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development. Her essays on science, medicine, and life have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post.  Dreger has also appeared on radio and television as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, CNN International, Discovery Health, HBO, and the BBC.

More about Dreger's work is available on her personal website: 

alicedreger.com