Historian Discusses Lung Transplant Guidelines

Historian Mary Jo Festle will give the Burkhardt Lecture in History, "Lung Transplantation in the U.S.: The Historical, Personal, and Political," at 4 p.m., Thursday, January 13, in the Alumni Room, Old Main, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The lecture is free and open to the public.

"Organ transplantation is different from many medical treatments and has posed issues that reached beyond the private realm of physician and patient," Festle explains. "Decisions about who gets organs that have been donated have been especially difficult and contested. In the past 50 years -- a relatively short history -- the allocation policy for lung transplantation in the United States has changed significantly."

Author of a forthcoming book on the history of lung transplantation in the United States, Festle will discuss how guidelines for transplants have changed, and will use excerpts from oral history interviews to highlight the experiences of people waiting for lung transplants.

Festle, professor of history at Elon University, graduated from Knox in 1983 with an interdisciplinary major, social change, that encompassed sociology, history, political science and economics. She graduated with College Honors for an interdisciplinary research project on the Chicago Women's Trade Union League, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received numerous awards for both academic and athletic accomplishments, including a Mellon Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Festle competed in basketball, softball and volleyball at Knox, and she is the author of the book "Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports." She received master's and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Burkhardt Lecture series is funded by an endowment, the Edgar and Ruth Burkhardt Lecture Fund, established by two Knox College graduates, Richard W. Burkhardt, former president and professor at Ball State University, and Dorothy Johnson Burkhardt, retired professor of modern languages at Ball State. Both are members of the Knox College Class of 1939. The lecture fund is named in memory of Mr. Burkhardt's parents.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 45 states and 48 countries. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.