A Letter from the Executive Director

Ihope you didn't say to yourself "Ho, hum, another annual report with long lists of donors and volunteers." Never underestimate the power of a list.

A few weeks ago, we had an e-mail from a woman in Massachusetts who was trying to find her uncle's long-lost World War II buddy. At age 89 and blind, her uncle had recently moved back into his childhood home with his sister and wanted to make one last effort to contact his friend. A Google search had turned up the name in our 2001 Annual Report, published in Maine Humanities. Could it be the same veteran?

We certainly don't give out the addresses or phone numbers of our friends and donors. But Susan DeWitt Wilder contacted the gentleman in question, and it was indeed he! She forwarded to him the Massachusetts address, and a friendship from 60 years ago was rekindled.

We are very grateful to all of you who are listed in this 2003 Annual Report for your support of the high-quality humanities programs we offer throughout the state. Check out the names — you don't know who you might find there!

Dorothy Schwartz

A Letter from the Chair

Maine Humanities Council board members and staff often talk about the impact of the Council's programs on the people of the state. But we seldom get a chance to speak of the impact our programs have had on us.

Last November, at the Federation of State Humanities Councils' annual conference held in Savannah, I was privileged to accept the national Schwartz Prize awarded to the Maine Humanities Council for Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care.® This was an extraordinary moment for me personally, because I have been active in this program from the very beginning.

I serve as a facilitator for the Literature & Medicine group that meets at Maine Coast Hospital in Ellsworth. I am also a historian of health care, writing a book on the ways illness was understood and experienced in the mid-nineteenth century South. These are rather abstract matters that have taken me into medical school libraries and archives, where I spend my time reading 150-year old medical journals, physicians' records, letters and diaries, and folk accounts.

I did not expect to find that my understanding of the past would be shaped to such an extent by insights from participants in Literature & Medicine seminars. Sometimes this has taken a very practical turn. When I did not understand some bit of medical terminology, there was always someone to ask — and who was willing to explain in language I could understand. Far more important, I am learning from seminar participants to think of the connection between health care providers and suffering people in new ways. I am learning that medical care providers today have far more complex attitudes about their patients and their work than I had imagined, and I have learned to see similar complexity in the past. I am learning that the ways medical providers today think about bodies and their illnesses are informed by a range of influences — science, culture, politics, tradition — and I have learned to see a similar range in the past. I have a better understanding of the past because of the insights I have gained from seminar participants today.

My work with the Maine Humanities Council has, I hope, enriched the lives of people throughout the state. I have no doubt about how it has enriched my own.

Marli Weiner

Thank you to the 2003 donors to the Constance H. Carlson Fund. Mr. & Mrs. William P. Adams Richard E. Barnes & Sandra Armentrout Wilma A. Bradford Ardis Cameron Eliot R. Cutler & Melanie Stewart Cutler Bobby & Sandy Ives Margaret J. Kravchuk & Harold Hamilton Pauleena MacDougall Nancy M. MacKnight Ed Pert Sanford Phippen Ann B. & Gordon H.S. Scott

Dorothy Schwartz, Executive Director of the Maine Humanities Council, with the winners of the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize, Karan Sheldon and David Weiss of Northeast Historic Film, and Marli Weiner, Board Chair of the Maine Humanities Council. Sheldon and Weiss received the prize for extraordinary contributions to the preservation and interpretation of New England's moving image history at a luncheon ceremony at Page Farm and Home Museum in Orono in September of 2003.