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CORVALLIS - Pulitzer Prize-winner Rhys Isaac, a professor emeritus at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, will give a free public lecture at Oregon State University this Friday, Oct. 10, in which he shares how world views of medicine have changed.

His lecture, "Medicine and Politics, Microcosm and Macrocosm: Reflections on a Revolution-time Virginia Practice," begins at 3 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public.

Isaac's book, "The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790," published by Chapel Hill in 1982, won the Pulitzer Prize in History.

He is completing a book about a Virginia planter who kept an extraordinary domestic diary from 1756 to 1778. The planter had studied medical texts and kept careful notes of his diagnoses and treatments of ailments suffered by him and his family, his workers and his neighbors.

In his lecture, Isaac will discuss how medical case histories reveal how attitudes about our bodies and illness have changed dramatically over time.

Isaac is the Distinguished Visiting Professor in History at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

The lecture is part of the American Culture and Politics series sponsored by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at OSU, and the Department of History.