Renowned Surgeon/Author To Lecture Nov. 12

Noted surgeon/author Richard Selzer will lecture at Baylor University at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, in room 100 in Morrison Constitution Hall, former site of Baylor's Law School. Selzer will discuss "The Scalpel and the Pen: The Doctor as Writer." The lecture is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences.
"Richard Selzer is widely anthologized in undergraduate reading texts and in medical school humanities courses. After long years as a surgeon and professor of surgery, he made an agonizing decision to turn from medicine to writing," said Ann Miller, professor of English and Master Teacher, who uses Selzer's works in Baylor's Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on Medicine course. "I have been touched by Selzer's generosity of spirit, enlarged by the genius of his mind, astonished by the depth and breadth of his imagination and healed by his words,"
Selzer, who was born in Troy, N.Y., graduated from Union College in 1948 and received an M.D. from Albany Medical College in 1953. He completed a surgical internship and residency at Yale University in 1960 and remained as assistant clinical professor of surgery until 1985, also maintaining a private practice.
At age 40, Selzer began writing, first penning horror stories as an exercise in writing. After three or four years, those stories began to be published, and he turned his attention to writing about his experiences in the medical profession. In 1974, his first collection of stories and essays titled "Rituals of Surgery" was published. Other books include "Confessions of a Knife," "The Exact Location of the Soul," "Raising the Dead: A Doctor's Encounter with His Own Mortality," "A Question of Mercy" and "The Doctor Stories."
He is a past recipient of a National Magazine Award, an American Medical Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Selzer's lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call (254) 710-3361.