Reinventing Medicine Author Larry Dossey M.D. to Discuss 'The Healing Power of Ordinary Things' March 8

December 25, 2005

December 25, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - Larry Dossey, M.D., the author of Reinventing Medicine and former executive editor of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, will come to the campus of DePauw University on Wednesday, March 8, 2006. Dr. Dossey will present the spring Mendenhall Lecture, "The Healing Power of Ordinary Things: How Spirituality and Medicine Intersect," at Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church. The speech begins at 7:30 p.m. and is free and open to all.

The former co-chair of the a panel that examined mind/body interventions for the National Institutes of Health, Dossey has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including Dateline, Larry King Live and Oprah!. His books, including the bestseller Healing Words, have focused on the relationship between healing, thought, and prayer. Larry Dossey's goal is a "medicine that works better and feels better."

Before the publication of Healing Words in 1993, only three U.S. medical schools had courses devoted to exploring the role of religious practice and prayer in health; currently, nearly 80 medical schools have instituted such courses, many of which utilize Dr. Dossey's works as textbooks.

"For more than a century the profession of medicine has tried to become increasingly scientific and technical, because this is where we believed the future of healing lay," Dossey writes in Reinventing Medicine. "Now a monumental shift is occurring, empowered by the evidence that consciousness is a powerful factor in the world."

After graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, Larry Dossey received his M.D. degree from Southwestern Medical School (Dallas) in 1967. He served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, later completing his residency in internal medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital and Parkland Hospital in Dallas. A physician of internal medicine, formerly with the Dallas Diagnostic Association and former chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, Dossey is past president of The Isthmus Institute of Dallas, an organization dedicated to exploring the possible convergences of science and religious thought.

Visit Dr. Dossey's Web site by clicking here.

The Mendenhall Lectures, which were inaugurated in 1913, were endowed by the Reverend Doctor Marmaduke H. Mendenhall. His desire was to enable the University to bring to campus "persons of high and wide repute, of broad and varied scholarship" to address issues related to the academic dialogue concerning Christianity. Although Mendenhall was a pastor in the North Indiana Annual Conference of what was then called the Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the parents of the United Methodist Church, he explicity dictated that lectures be selected without regard to denominational divisions. The endowment has allowed DePauw to bring theological and religious scholars of international repute to campus for nearly a century.

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