Reverence for Life on the Streets: Medicine as a Moral Act in an Unequal World

On the eve of Aspen’s second Albert Schweitzer Day, three of the world’s most consequential voices in humanitarian medicine will share the TACAW stage for a public conversation about care, conscience, and the demands of this moment. Join us after the event for a reception and light bites, hosted by the Aspen Historical Society. Harsh Mander, New Delhi-based civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has spent decades fighting for the rights of the poorest and most excluded, building a body of work spanning landmark litigation, legislation, and some of the most important writing on poverty, displacement, and human dignity in the world. Dr. Jim O’Connell, founder of Boston Health Care for the Homeless and the subject of Tracy Kidder’s Rough Sleepers, has built one of the most enduring models of compassionate urban medicine globally. Dr. Jim Withers, founder of the Street Medicine Institute and last year’s Schweitzer lecturer in Aspen, is the father of street medicine and has spent over thirty years taking medicine directly to people living on the streets. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Kaitlin Schwan, human rights activist and street medicine scholar. Together, they have answered the same call through radically different paths. In a time of rising nationalism, austerity, and the systematic withdrawal of care from the most vulnerable, their work asks a question Schweitzer posed from this very city in 1949: what does it mean to preserve our humanity?