Ansell to discuss ‘Diversity and Equity in an Age of Denial’ at Beyond the Knife

“Diversity and Equity in an Age of Denial: Actions Speak Louder Than Words” is the title of UB’s fifth annual Beyond the Knife lecture on Feb. 27.

David Ansell, author of “The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills,” is the keynote speaker. Ansell is Michael E. Kelly Presidential Professor of Internal Medicine and senior vice president/associate provost for community health equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

For four decades, Ansell has been providing care in some of the poorest areas in Chicago. In addition to documenting what he calls the structural violence of social inequality, he has founded organizations that fight health disparities, published about egregious medical practices like patient dumping, and testified before Congress.

The UB event is free and open to the public. A public reception will be held at 5 p.m. and the lecture begins at 5:45 p.m. in Room 2220, the M&T Lecture Hall, in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, 955 Main St., Buffalo.

It also will be livestreamed on Zoom. Registration for either in-person or virtual attendance is available. bit.ly/2025BTK.

“We are honored to host the fifth annual Beyond the Knife event this year with Dr. Ansell,” says Steven Schwaitzberg, UB Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Surgery. “He personifies through his actions the kind of physician we are working to train and graduate at the Jacobs School, one who is profoundly dedicated to his patients, his scholarly work and to tireless activism to align institutional practice with the needs of the poor.”

Ansell’s talk will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by WGRZ-TV anchor Claudine Ewing and featuring:

• Leonard Egede, Charles and Mary Bauer Endowed Chair of the Department of Medicine at UB and president & CEO, UBMD Internal Medicine.
• Andrew Davis, president and chief operating officer, Erie County Medical Center.
• Zeneta Everhart, Buffalo Common Council member representing the Masten District.

Opening remarks will be made by Rev. Mark E. Blue, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Lackawanna and president of the Buffalo branch of the NAACP; Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School; and Schwaitzberg, founder of the Department of Surgery’s anti-racism and health equity initiatives.

While working at Cook County Hospital (now the John H. Stroger Hospital) in the 1980s, Ansell and his colleagues exposed the then-common practice of “patient dumping” in which indigent patients who showed up at private hospitals were immediately transferred to the overloaded public hospitals nearby. In a 1986 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, they documented the practice and the many unnecessary deaths that resulted. Ansell testified before a congressional committee on the subject, and a 1986 law made such patient transfers largely illegal.

In one of the nation’s first efforts to address race-based health disparities, Ansell founded and directed the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program at Cook County Hospital. In 1995, he became chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, Chicago’s largest, private, safety-net hospital, where he helped found the Sinai Urban Health Institute, a major health-disparity research and intervention center.  

He contributed to founding the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce, a group dedicated to the elimination of this disparity in the Chicago area. In 2015, Ansell helped found the DePaul-Rush Center for Community Health Equity, a health equity educational and research center based at DePaul University and Rush University Medical Center.

In 2011, he published a memoir of his time at County Hospital called “County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital,” which The Wall Street Journal named one of the five best books on health published in 2011.

A graduate of SUNY Upstate Medical University, Ansell did his medical training at Cook County Hospital, where he spent 13 years as an attending physician and was then appointed chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine. He also served as Rush University Medical Center’s chief medical officer.