2024-2025: How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities
The layered and productive relationships of ethics, medicine, and narrative are at the heart of this year's examination of the four pillars of western medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. With an emphasis on narrative and testimony, the series will offer a multidisciplinary inquiry-from the fields of anthropology, art, ethics, law, medicine, and religion-into poignant questions and dilemmas related to medical research, care, and access. For instance, what happens when the harms of a medical experiment are not conveyed to its subjects? What does it mean to die with dignity? What are the conflicting social values and personal beliefs around such a practice? Why do specific diseases disproportionately affect indigenous populations in the Americas? Who has the moral responsibility to respond to such endemic disease and how? Is there a social obligation to provide healthcare to all? These questions and others bear directly on how we conceive of notions of autonomy, beneficence, non-harm, and justice, which in turn affect how we live and die.
Clinical Assistant Professor: Duke Department of Anesthesiology, Division of Critical Care Medicine Faculty Associate: Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, Duke University
Public Lecture Title: In Critical Condition: A State of the Union on Compassion, Death and Purpose Thursday, September 19, 2024 at 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater
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Having a deep understanding of the vulnerability inherent at the end of life, Dr. Adjoa Boateng Evans uses this lens to explore the ethics around how we die. Her medical humanities work centers around the "Prophesy of Pain" as she grapples to reconcile suffering novel to the human condition experienced by patients and providers. Adjoa marries this to her current areas of interest, which include the intersection of faith, medicine, the arts and the disadvantaged. She currently is investigating racial and ethnic disparities in critical care medicine and seeks to bring equitable end of life care to communities of color.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics, and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine
Public Lecture Title: The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine Tuesday, October 22, 2024 at 5:00 pm, Northen Auditorium
Access to the recording of the event will be available for the W&L community.
Over his decade-long career as a practicing physician, Dr. Ricardo Nuila's first-hand experiences have fueled his writing on health disparities, healthcare policy, and the interface between art and medicine. His stunning debut, The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, details the stories of five Houstonians unable to access healthcare in his hometown of Houston, TX. Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors?
Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota Affiliate Faculty, Bioethics Centre, University of Otago (New Zealand)
Public Lecture Title: The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No Thursday, November 14, 2024 at 5:00 pm, Northen Auditorium
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Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.
This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Staniar Gallery, the Department of Art and Art History, the History Department, the Biology Department, Environmental Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Cohort, and the Class of '63 Scholars-in-Residence Program administered by the Provost's Office.
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who explores concepts and issues that exist within a contemporary Indigenous experience, including how culture and identity operate in a rapidly changing world. Lord draws on her experience of growing up between Alaska and Upper Michigan and her mixed-race cultural identity drawn from Athabaskan, Iñupiat, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, and English descent. To address a multiple or mixed identity, Lord uses a variety of mediums to construct new, ambiguous, or challenging representations of race and culture.
The Codes We Carry: Beadwork as DNA Data is a series of sculptural objects combining traditional Indigenous art forms and techniques with DNA analysis to raise awareness of health disparities for Native people.
Public Lecture Title: Till Soon, Anne Monday, March 24, 2025, 7:00 to 9:00 pm, Northen Auditorium This event is co-sponsored with the Glasgow Endowment and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Film Studies
Christine Toy Johnson is a Tony and Obie honored, Rosetta Lenoire award-winning actor, writer, director, filmmaker, and advocate for inclusion based in New York City. Her public lecture will discuss the meaning and production of Till Soon, Anne a musical about a young woman who consciously ends her journey with terminal brain cancer.
