Culture of Pain author to present Gunn-Loke Lecture April 20

David Morris

Dr. David Morris, author of The Culture of Pain, will give the 14th annual Gunn-Loke Lecture next week. He will speak on “Reinventing Pain” at 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 20, in room T-639 of the Health Sciences Center. The presentation is open to everyone.

The Gunn-Loke Lecture is sponsored by the School of Medicine and the UW Multidisciplinary Pain Center, and supported by an endowment established by Dr. and Mrs. C. Chan Gunn of Vancouver, B.C.

The Culture of Pain, published in 1991, won a prestigious PEN prize and has been translated into German, Spanish and Japanese. Morris, who is an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of New Mexico, has subsequently lectured and written on pain for a wide variety of medical and non-medical audiences. He wrote an award-winning article in Arthritis Today and has given keynote addresses at meetings of the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Society for Pain Management Nurses. He is associate editor for the journal Literature and Medicine.

As a scholar of British literature, Morris wrote two prize-winning books, The Religious Sublime and Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, before resigning a full professorship at the University of Iowa in 1982 to write full time. His recent work includes Earth Warrior, an account of accompanying environmental activist Paul Watson on a ship-ramming, anti-driftnet campaign in the North Pacific. His latest book, Illness and Culture in Postmodern Age, describes some of the ways to understand illness as created at the crossroads of biology and culture. ¶