What exactly is suffering when it comes to medicine? Is it simply a matter of physical pain that health-care providers attempt to relieve in their patients or does a self-image problem that someone hopes to fix through cosmetic surgery qualify as a form of suffering addressed by medicine?

A grand rounds talk presented by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics will explore the issue along with ways that popular culture inserts itself into medicine.

Suzanne Holland, PhD, associate professor of religious and social ethics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., will deliver the talk.

“To Relieve Human Suffering: Medicine, Ethics and the Culture of Conformity” will explore some of the issues raised by modern technologies at the intersection of medicine, ethics and popular culture.

The talk is Thursday at noon in room M-106 of the medical school.

For more information, visit the center’s Web site at http://scbe.stanford.edu.