Author Event: Joe Lex, Author of All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

"Not all "hidden Figures" are mathematicians or engineers. Some are political figures. Others chose medicine, while still others went into the arts. This book tells the amazing stories of more than 50 women whose final resting place is two cemeteries in Philadelphia."

About Joe Lex:

Joe Lex retired in 2016 after 45+ years in emergency medicine which he started as a combat medic in Viet Nam and ended as a professor of Emergency Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. When he took a tour of the historic Laurel Hill Cemetery, founded in 1836, he realized that the role of a cemetery docent seemed to suit his personality. After a year or so of giving tours, he decided that both cemeteries, East and West, really needed a podcast to talk about their amazing inhabitants. The result was "All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories", followed a couple of years later by "Biographical Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories". Soon he had accumulated hundreds of scripts loaded with biographical and historical information, along with some pretty astounding stories of movers and shakers, artists, authors, and entertainers, scholars and educators, healers and givers, and the inevitable odds and ends - a woman who started her own religion, another who videotaped everything on television for 30 years, a 20 year-old religion instructor who died of a heroin overdose at the start of the 20th century, and a woman whose family thought that her husband had poisoned her for her wealth.

Joe already has enough scripts for "All Bones Considered: 52 Laurel Hill Men" and "All Bones Considered: 52 More Laurel Hill Men." In a couple of years, he will have enough material for "52 More Laurel Hill Women." He is also trying to figure out the best way to share more than 160 letters he sent home from Viet Nam to his family when he served with the 1st Battalion (Mechanized), 5th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division as a medic from May 1968 to May 1969. After honorable discharge and a series of varying dead-end jobs, Joe earned an Associate Degree in nursing from a local community college. He was accepted into medical school at University of Texas Health Science Center – San Antonio and served as class president for more than three years. A residency in Emergency Medicine at Thomas Jefferson followed, then 14 years as a community emergency physician before entering academia in 2003. He was an invited speaker at dozens of national and international meetings and served five years as chair of the education committee for the American Academy of emergency Medicine, which renamed its Educator of the Year Award the "Joe Lex Award." He is also considered the "Godfather of Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM-ED), which has provided free didactic emergency medicine training to thousands of people around the world. He is also trying to write a musical about the Red Rose Girls and produce a play about a heavily perfumed cross-dressing 300-pound Roman Catholic priest who mentored F. Scott Fitzgerald.