Dr. David Ansell to Discuss ‘Diversity and Equity in an Age of Denial’ at UB’s Beyond the Knife Event

UB Department of Surgery Hosts Fifth Annual Lecture on Health Equity

The University at Buffalo’s Department of Surgery will host its f ifth annual Beyond the Knife lecture on Feb. 27, featuring keynote speaker Dr. David Ansell, author of The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills.

Ansell, the 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, has spent four decades providing care in some of the city’s most underserved communities. His work highlights the structural violence of social inequality, and he has been instrumental in founding organizations that fight health disparities.

His lecture, titled “Diversity and Equity in an Age of Denial: Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” will take place at 5:45 p.m. in Room 2220 (M&T Lecture Hall) at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, 955 Main St., Buffalo. A public reception will begin at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and will also be livestreamed via Zoom. Registration for both in-person and virtual attendance is available at bit.ly/2025BTK.

“We are honored to host the fifth annual Beyond the Knife event this year with Dr. Ansell,” said Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg, UB Distinguished Professor, chair of the Department of Surgery, and president and CEO of UBMD Surgery. “He personifies the kind of physician we strive to train— one dedicated to patient care, scholarship, and activism for the underserved.”

Panel Discussion to Follow Lecture Following Ansell’s talk, a panel discussion will be moderated by WGRZ-TV anchor Claudine Ewing and feature Dr. Leonard Egede, Charles and Mary Bauer Endowed Chair of the Department of Medicine at UB and president & CEO of UBMD Internal Medicine. Andrew Davis, president and chief operating officer of Erie County Medical Center. Zeneta Everhart, Buffalo Common Council member representing the Masten District.

Opening remarks will be delivered by:

Rev. Mark E. Blue, pastor of Second Baptist Church of Lackawanna and president of the Buffalo branch of the NAACP. Dr. Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School. Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg, founder of the Department of Surgery’s anti-racism and health equity initiatives. A Legacy of Advocacy in Health Equity In the 1980s, while working at Cook County Hospital (now John H. Stroger Hospital), Ansell and colleagues exposed the practice of “patient dumping”—transferring indigent patients from private hospitals to overloaded public ones. His 1986 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine documented the practice and the preventable deaths it caused, leading to congressional testimony and a federal law banning such transfers.

Ansell has since founded initiatives such as the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program at Cook County Hospital and the Sinai Urban Health Institute, a major health-disparity research center. He also helped establish the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce and the DePaul-Rush Center for Community Health Equity, a research and educational center addressing health disparities.

His 2011 memoir, County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital, was named one of The Wall Street Journal’s top five health books of the year.

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

For more information about the event, visit bit.ly/2025BTK.