BINGHAMTON, NY – The 2014 Mario and Antoinette Romano Lecture, "Creative Disability and the Shaking Palsy: Approaching a History of Parkinson’s disease" will be held at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 2 in the Old Union Hall of the University Union, on campus. This event is free and open to the public.

Musical rhythm may have a primal function in the brain which modern science is yet to fully explain. Researchers have noted accounts of patients with various types of frontal lobe lesions, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, who have developed new aptitude for musical creativity after the onset of their disease. This has led some experts to speculate that creative inhibition is genetically coded into frontal lobe function and can be disengaged by these diseases.

Guest speaker Dorothy Porter, professor of the History of Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco will investigate how scientific and cultural interpretations of the relationship between creativity and Parkinson’s disease have developed and changed over time.

Porter has published widely on the history of public health, social medicine and health citizenship. In earlier work, she investigated the experience of patients and healers of health and illness during the Enlightenment and is currently exploring creativity and Parkinson’s disease in patients before and after the impact of the genomic revolution on redefining this relationship.

The Mario and Antoinette Romano Lecture Series was endowed in 1984 by the Romanos to sponsor lectures given by noted speakers in history, economics, art history and medicine.

For more information or to RSVP by Monday, March 31, contact Tracey Greene at tgreene@binghamton.edu or 607-777-6799.