May 17, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The School of Medicine at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) will hold its Honors Convocation for graduating medical school students at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 21 at the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center. The Convocation honors the 158 graduates of the Class of 2000. The school will hold its capping and awards ceremony at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 20, in the Margaret Cameron Spain Auditorium.

The school’s Tuscaloosa campus holds it awards banquet on Friday, May 19 at the Sheraton Four Points. The Huntsville campus awards banquet will be Friday, May 19 at 6:00 p.m. in the Huntsville Hilton Ballroom.

Sixty two percent of the 2000 graduates will do their residency training in one of the primary care fields. Seventy two percent will receive their residency training at hospitals in the southeast, with forty percent remain at hospitals in Alabama.

The Honors Convocation speaker is John Stone, M.D., professor of medicine, associate dean, and director of admissions for Emory School of Medicine. He has also been a lecturer for the School of English.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Dr. Stone graduated from Millsaps College, then received his M.D. degree from Washington University School of Medicine. He trained in medicine and cardiology at the University of Rochester and Emory University, joining the Emory faculty in 1969.

Stone’s poetry includes The Smell Of Matches, In All This Rain, and Renaming The Streets. His fourth book, Where Water Begins, received a Literature Award (Stone’s second) from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in May 1999.

Stone's essays have appeared often in The New York Times Magazine, as well as in Journal of the American Medical Association, Discover, MD Magazine, and others.

Stone is co-editor of an anthology of literature and medicine, On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays. The book is presented annually as a gift from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to students entering U.S. medical schools (175,000 books have been distributed).

A sought-after speaker, Stone has read and lectured at celebratory events at well over 100 institutions in 36 states and given named lectures at Yale, Stanford, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Brown, and The Mayo Clinic. Stone wrote the libretto for Canticles of Time, a choral symphony that won the Music Award of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters (1991). His work was a front page feature in the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 1998.

Stone co-edited Principles and Practice of Emergency Medicine, the first comprehensive textbook in that discipline. For 11 years, he served as director of the emergency medicine residency at Grady Hospital-Emory University.