World-renowned doctor to speak in Davenport
World-renowned physician and activist Dr. Jim O’Connell will speak at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport, Sunday, April 21, at 4 p.m. in the St. Paul Sanctuary, 2136 Brady St.
In partnership with Augustana College, St. Paul is welcoming Dr. O’Connell, a Harvard-educated physician who has devoted 40 years of his life serving Boston’s homeless population. Pulitzer-prize-winning author Tracy Kidder has chronicled the unparalleled work of O’Connell and his mobile outreach clinic in his 2023 book Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.
“Rough Sleepers” is available in the St. Paul non-profit bookstore for $17.50.
In the 1980s, homelessness was quickly on the rise. When Boston received a grant from the Robert Johnson Wood Foundation to create a program to bridge the gap between medical treatment and Boston’s homeless population, Dr. O’Connell was the doctor approached to manage and maintain the program, according to a St. Paul’s release.
He chose to defer his fellowship with Sloan Kettering for one year, and the day after he completed his residency, after three years of 110-hour work weeks, he started what he believed would be just one single year, only 365 days, of running this program.
After that first year was done, O’Connell realized he wasn’t ready to leave this work or this community behind. Instead, he packed his essential items into a knapsack, hopped into an outreach van, and took to the streets of Boston, armed with medical treatments and supplies, food, blankets, and a listening and empathetic ear to the city’s ‘rough sleepers,’ those who chose to sleep outside instead of in cramped and crowded shelters, St. Paul said.
“This is what I was trained for. I wanted to take care of people who were sick. And, oh, my God, have I landed in a world where people are sick,” O’Connell said in the release.
Led by the practical guidance of the dedicated nurses at Pine Street Inn, Boston’s largest homeless shelter, O’Connell developed a different approach to engaging with those who would become his patients, one that was outside of the typical doctor’s approach. Those first 365 days turned into more than 14,600 days, and during this time, O’Connell explored the changing medical landscape, navigating the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
In the book Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People. Kidder explores the beginning of O’Connell’s career, the first ‘temporary year’ of this doctor’s unexpected work, the retraining it took to find unconventional approaches to connecting with these rough sleepers, and how that one year turned into 40.
Kidder outlines the five years he spent observing O’Connell and his team of devoted medical personnel, and shares the stories of the doctor and the people of Boston who changed his life.
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