Three things you’ll learn at today’s Davis Lecture

About the lecture The lecture is sponsored by the McGoogan Library of Medicine and supported through an endowed fund created in 2008 by the late Dr. Richard B. Davis, professor emeritus of internal medicine at UNMC, and his wife, Jean. Dr. Davis created the lectureship to illustrate the impact of key scientific findings and to support special collections at the McGoogan Library, including works on the history of medicine.

Here are three interesting facts you’ll learn today if you attend the Richard B. Davis, M.D., Ph.D., History of Medicine Lecture at 4 p.m. in the Mary Ann “Maisie” Paustian Amphitheater, Room 3001 in the Sorrell Center:

• Physicians and surgeons in 18th century hospitals were elected to their posts by the hospitals’ boards of governors in public elections;
  
• Hospital patients were explicitly forbidden from bringing liquor into the wards and from playing cards or dice; and
  
• Yes — it’s true — 98 percent of the bodies that students used to learn anatomy by dissection were either body-snatched (taken before burial) or “resurrected” (removed from the grave after burial).

Susan Lawrence, Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will discuss these and other topics during the lecture.

A reception will follow in the Linder Reading Room, also in the Sorrell Center.