Special Program / Science as Story

Dawn Raffel

A Doctor in Time: Making History Matter to a Modern Audience

Thursday, March 26th  |  7 pm  |  ONLINE via GoToWebinar

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dr. Martin Couney exhibited premature infants at many world’s fairs and festivals, and at Coney Island and Atlantic City, displayed in their incubators alongside sword swallowers, bearded ladies, and burlesque performers. What may seem bizarre or even grotesque to a modern audience was actually quite innovative; known then as “weaklings,” these previously doomed babies were not allowed in most hospitals, and for desperate families, Dr. Couney was a savior. Dawn Raffel’s book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, is a thrilling mystery about an eccentric, larger-than-life personality, his goals and motivations, and the shadow of his past.


 

Q & A with Dawn Raffel: A moderated discussion about writing

Friday, March 27th  |  10 am  |  ONLINE ONLY

Join Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, in an intimate setting to explore the use of narrative in her work.


 

Dawn Raffel is a journalist, memoirist, and short story writer whose work has been widely anthologized. A longtime magazine editor, she helped launch O, The Oprah Magazine. She has also taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia University; at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania; and at the Center for Fiction in New York. She now works as an independent editor and book reviewer.

 


 

3/12  Azra Raza  |  The C Word: Writing About Cancer Using Scholarship and Empathy
3/22  Amanda Little  |  Climate Change at Home: Bringing a Global Problem to the Dinner Table
3/26  Dawn Raffel  |  A Doctor in Time: Making History Matter to a Modern Audience
4/02  Danielle Ofri  |  
Medical Error: The Untold Story in Medicine
4/16  Ruth Kassinger  |  Biology on the Page: Delighting the Reader with Fascinating Facts

 


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Funding for the Science as Story project is provided by The Pittsburgh Foundation.