Stukes Lecture set for March 31
Dr. Charles S. Bryan, Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, is scheduled to deliver this year’s Stukes Lecture on Thursday, March 31, at 3 p.m. in Memorial Hall. Based on Bryan’s 2014 book, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra, the address is entitled “Paradigms, Personalities, and Pellagra Pre-Goldberger.” Admission is free and the public is welcome.
Bryan is a native of Columbia, South Carolina. He studied at Harvard College, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center before returning to Columbia in 1974 to serve as the first infectious diseases specialist in central South Carolina.
A charter faculty member at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, he served successively as director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, and director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, retiring from the university in 2008. He spent the remainder of his career at Providence Hospitals, Columbia, and retired from active medical practice on his 76th birthday.
Bryan is the author of 14 books and monographs, more than 161 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and more than 300 editorials. He writes mainly about infectious diseases, medical history, medical biography, and various aspects of the humanities as applied to medicine, including the status of medicine as a profession. He is recognized as a world authority on Sir William Osler (1849-1919), sometimes described as the “father of modern medicine.”
An inductee of the Society of St. Luke and the Order of the Palmetto, Bryan is also the recipient of the William Osler Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Theodore E. Woodward Award of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Osler Society, and, from the American College of Physicians, the Laureate Award, the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award, and the Centennial Legacy Award.
The Joseph T. Stukes Lecture Series brings a distinguished lecturer in history to Erskine College each year. The fund was established by students and colleagues of Stukes, who served as professor of history (1966-74) and vice president for academic affairs (1966-71) at Erskine College. He died in 2016.
