Former UF medicine chairman Cluff to give lecture “On the Lost Art of Healing”

Author and University of Florida medical Professor Emeritus Leighton Cluff, M.D., will present a lecture at UF on problems in physician/patient relationships titled “On the Lost Art of Healing.”

Cluff, an immunologist and infectious disease specialist who chaired the College of Medicine’s department of medicine from 1966 to 1976, will speak at noon Jan. 21 in auditorium C1-17 of the UF Health Science Center’s Communicore Building. The event is free and open to the public.

He will appear as part of the UF Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities Speaker Series, funded by the Thomas H. Maren Foundation. Maren was a founding father of UF’s College of Medicine whose research led to the development of Trusopt, a top-selling drug for glaucoma.

In his half century of practice, Cluff has learned the importance of empathy, said Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig, the UF College of Medicine’s historian and coordinator of the speaker series.

“Dr. Cluff has had a very broad vision of health care in his career and has seen many interesting developments,” Stoyan-Rosenzweig said. “He’s done a lot of work internationally on public health issues, notably the treatment of cholera.”

Cluff has authored or edited 10 books on medicine. His latest, “The Lost Art of Caring,” was co-edited with Robert H. Binstock, Ph.D., and is a collection of essays arguing that modern medicine places too little value on empathy. Cluff also is past president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a private philanthropic organization.