Fresh Air, Drew Gilpin Faust and Dr. Richard Shannon, January 9, 2008

By: Terry Gross

Length: 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Hear Drew Gilpin Faust and Dr. Richard Shannon on this edition of Fresh Air.

Drew Gilpin Faust is the president of Harvard University, where she holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. In her new book, she writes about how the deaths - both in number and manner - during the American Civil War transformed the nation. Her new book is This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. She writes that the rate of death during the Civil War and its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population was "six times that of World War II". She writes, "For those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience�was the presence of death. At war's end this shared suffering would override persisting differences about the meanings of race, citizenship, and nationhood to establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite."

Then, Dr. Richard Shannon, a pioneer in the national movement to reduce hospital-acquired infections. He is the senior vice chair for clinical affairs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His work on patient safety was featured in the PBS documentary Remaking American Medicine, and he sits on the Governor's Special Panel on Patient Safety. [Broadcast Date: January 9, 2008]

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