Medicine

Dr. Mark Hochberg is the CEO of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, a private medical society that was founded in 1787 that includes the fourth largest medical historical library in the country, and the Mutter Museum. He'll talk about his colleague Gretchen Worden.

Daszak is the executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. The program is designed to study the environmental changes brought on by humans and the links between animal, human and ecosystem health. The consortium is interested in finding out how infectious diseases like West Nile virus, malaria and other emerging diseases move between populations, or depend on environmental conditions.

Farmer is an infectious disease specialist and a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" grant for his work treating tuberculosis in Haiti. He is the subject of the new book Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.

Dr. Sheri Fink's new book is War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival. It's about a group of doctors who treated patients in Srebrenica, Bosnia, under the most extreme conditions. They treated thousands of patients, often without electricity, water or proper medicine. Fink, a physician and writer based in New York, works with the humanitarian organization International Medical Corps. She just returned from Iraq and has also worked in the Balkans, southern Africa and Central Asia.

Murray has written a new collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. Many of his stories are informed by his experiences as a doctor with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service when he traveled to developing countries like Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Murray is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Surgical resident and staff writer on medicine and science for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande. His new book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on An Imperfect Science, is based on his experiences and "how messy, uncertain and also surprising medicine turns out to be."

South African surgeon, journalist and documentary filmmaker Jonathan Kaplan has treated patients in many war torn locations, including Kurdistan, Mozambique, and Eritrea. He writes about his experiences in his new book, The Dressing Station: A Surgeons Chronicle of War and Medicine (Grove Press). He began his medical career in South Africa, where he first cared for patients wounded by political violence.

Executive director of the USA division of the French medical relief organization Doctors without Borders, Nicolas De Torrente. During August, he was in the Northern Territory of Afghanistan checking on the work of the organization. To do their work, Doctors without Borders had to negotiate with the Taliban. After the attacks, the organization had to evacuate all foreign workers out of the country, leaving their Afhani staff behind. De Torrente was flying to JFK airport on Sept. 11, and his plane was one of the last international planes to land in the U.S.

Dana Wechsler Linden and Mia Wechsler Doron, M.D., authors of the book, Preemies: the Essential Guide for Parents of Premature Babies. Linden and Doron are sisters, both personally interested in providing information to the public about premature babies. Ms. Linden gave birth to premature twins, and is a journalist. She is also a former senior editor at Forbes Magazine. Dr. Doron is a neonatologist at the Newborn Critical Care Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Writer Julie Fenster. She written a new book about the coincidence and circumstance that led to the first use of ether, making surgery painless for the first time. The breakthru day — known as Ether Day — was Oct. 16, 1846. One of the men behind it was a Boston dentist, William Morton, who was also a conman and an opportunist. Fenster tells the story in her new book, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made it (HarperCollins). Fenster is a columnist for American Heritage and a contributor to the New York Times.