Joseph J Fins Speaks at Wesleyan University

Distinguished doctor and medical researcher Joseph J. Fins, MD, will discuss his new work on Thursday, November 5th, 2015, at 8:00 pm in Wesleyan University’s Russell House, 350 High Street, Middletown, CT.

A Wesleyan alumnus and former trustee, Joseph J. Fins is Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College and Director of Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical Center. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The author of over 250 publications, Fins is a co-author of a landmark 2007 Nature paper that described the first use of deep brain stimulation in the minimally conscious state. His most recent book, Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethic, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, August, 2015), places society’s obligations to patients with severe injury within the historical legacy of the civil and disability rights movements.

Editorial Reviews:

“Dr Fins has written a powerful and ethically challenging book that introduces the science of severe brain injury in the context of the stories of families committed to the recoveries of their loved ones. Dr Fins knows this difficult terrain firsthand as the ethicist member of a team that has pioneered technologies intended to engage the conscious thoughts of individuals rendered by their injuries unable to communicate or even move.”

--Steven E. Hyman, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

“Dr Fins has provided us with a wonderful book that masterfully integrates the clinical and ethical challenges faced by medical care providers along with a deep empathy for the challenges faced by patients and their families. Above all this volume is a call, even a demand, to do better. I strongly recommend this thoughtful, readable, deeply informed, and challenging volume.”

--Harold T. Shapiro, President Emeritus of Princeton University and former Chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission

“Rights Come to Mind is a beautiful book that blends science, humanity, morality, and law to paint a far more nuanced picture of severe brain injury than ever before. The book teaches, moves, and provokes as it sets out its vision for the rights of this long-ignored population.”

--Abbe R. Gluck, Yale Law School

Free and open to the public.

Reception and book signing to follow the reading.

For more information, please call 860.685.3448 or visit

http://www.wesleyan.edu/writingevents