Join professor Ed Cohen on Friday, January 13 at 7:00pm (ET) for the launch of his new book, ON LEARNING TO HEAL. He will be in conversation with Emily Lim Rogers.

The event will consist of a reading, book talk, Q&A, and signing.

About ON LEARNING TO HEAL: At age thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In ON LEARNING TO HEAL, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd.

Ed Cohen is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of A Body Worth Defending, also published by Duke University Press. He hosts a therapeutic practice for people interested in healing: healingcounsel.com.

Emily Lim Rogers is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies at Brown University. She writes about chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis, biomedicine, and debility. Her work has appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and Somatosphere, and she is a contributor to the forthcoming anthology Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023).