Page 11 - Program 2018

Paris 1919: Six Months That An American Sickness Barbarian Days
Changed the World Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal Douglas Brunt and William Finnegan
Margaret MacMillan Wednesday 10:30–11:15 am Wednesday 10:30–11:15 am
Wednesday 10:30–11:15 am Anne Rice Room Joan Didion Room
Walt Disney Room
The American healthcare system is a battlefield full In William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession,
For a good portion of 1919, after the end of “the war of empty promises and political reform that seems surfing only looks like a sport. To insiders on
to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow locked in combat. We can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth surfboards, it is something completely of its own
Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Rosenthal, author of An American Sickness, will take world: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of
and French Premier Georges Clémenceau—met in us inside the doctor-patient relationship and to study, a morally dangerous pastime, and a way of
Paris to shape a lasting peace. Join historian Margaret hospital rooms, explaining step-by-step the workings life. Join Finnegan and New York Times best-selling
MacMillan and David Bryant as they recount those of a system badly lacking transparency. Learn what novelist Douglas Brunt as they talk about Barbarian
fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, we can do, as individual patients, to navigate the Days, Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.
Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out maze that is American healthcare and why we need
of the ruins of bankrupt empires. to demand far-reaching reform.

“Only in America do medical
treatment and recovery coexist
with a peculiar national dread: the
struggle to figure out from the
mounting pile of bills what portion

of the fantastical charges you
actually must pay.”
— Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal

“In the fluid world of 1919, it was
possible to dream of great change,

or have nightmares about the
collapse of order.”
— Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919

William Finnegan during his “barbarian days”
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