Jim Withers is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series Withers, founder of the Street Medicine Institute, will give a lecture on March 26 at 5 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater on W&L’s campus.

By Emily Innes
March 24, 2025

Jim Withers, founder of the Street Medicine Institute, will present a lecture on March 26 at 5 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons as part of W&L’s Mudd Center for Ethics’ series on “How We Live & Die.”

Withers’ lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Go to the People: Ethics and Access of Street Medicine.” The event will also be streamed online at https://go.wlu.edu/livestream.

A practicing physician in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Withers began making medical visits to the city’s homeless population in 1992, motivated by the desire to reach out and serve those who had been excluded from mainstream healthcare systems. Withers discovered that, due to a variety of external and internal barriers, many homeless individuals were unable to access or navigate existing healthcare services and needed a different care model that would meet patients where they were.

Withers began developing this care model, emphasizing compassion, creativity and collaboration, and founded the Street Medicine Institute (SMI) as a non-profit organization in 2009. The SMI helps develop and sustain the emerging field of street medicine while training and supporting new and existing programs worldwide. There is currently a global network of Street Medicine programs in 85 cities across 15 countries and five continents, and the initiative continues to grow. The first Street Medicine Fellowship was established in 2019 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Mercy Hospital.

“I came to learn about Dr. Withers’ extraordinary work from Marisa Charley, director of the Bonner Program on campus,” said Melissa Kerin, director of the Mudd Center. “Once I started reading about him, it became abundantly clear that Withers’ work was the perfect culminating perspective for this year’s theme on medical ethics. Withers began a street medicine initiative (as Operation Safety Net) in 1992. It has grown tremendously and serves as a robust system of medical care for unhoused individuals in Pittsburgh, and well beyond. His work is a powerful example of applied ethics, which has impacted numerous medical school programs that now offer training in street medicine. For Withers, this work is not only about bringing better healthcare to the streets; he sees it as part of a larger communal healing, one in which we are all committed and connected to one another.”

In addition to his work with SMI, Withers practices with the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System and is on the internal medicine teaching faculty of UPMC Mercy Hospital. He is also an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Global Ethics in the 21st Century, Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, The Ethics of Technology, Daily Ethics and Beneficence, and the Ethics of Design.