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Laughing, Crying, and Enduring: Ethics and Awake Deep Brain Stimulation

Paul J. Ford, PhD
Clinical Ethicist and Education Director
Cleveland Clinic

Awake surgeries for Deep Brain Stimulation provide opportunities for reflection on the ethical obligations and responsibilities within the operating room. The voices of patients regarding their experiences present fertile grounds for reflecting on these considerations based in lived experience. For this talk I will reflect on our interviews with 36 patients who underwent awake placement of Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson Disease. In particular, careful attention will be paid to themes of comfort, endurance, and humor.

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Lecture Canceled

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The Patient Who Is Not: Are Living Organ Donors a Blind Spot in the Medical Gaze?

Megan Crowley-Matoka, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

The classic ethical underpinnings of living organ donation in the U.S. require that living donors be healthy people who have freely chosen to give up part of their own bodies for the benefit of another person. Intended to be protective, this conception of living donors also sets them apart from the traditional role of the patient – a role to which the transplant recipient can always more compellingly lay claim. This talk draws on ethnographic research with living kidney and liver donors to explore the consequential ways in which living donors may be perceived – and, critically, may perceive themselves – as “non-patients.” Beyond implications for the ethics and practice of transplantation itself, I suggest attending seriously to this dimension of the living donation experience also opens up a set of larger questions about the shifting status of “patient-hood” in American biomedicine.

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Lisa Lehmann, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics, Harvard
Director, Center for Bioethics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Moral Courage in Medicine: Measuring and Cultivating It

Health care providers commonly face situations that call for moral courage including delivering care to an infectious patient, meeting an angry patient or family member, addressing an incompetent or impaired colleague, or disclosure of a medical error. In all of these circumstances, we may be confronted with the challenge of a trade off between doing what is right for patients and our own self-interest. Dr. Lehmann will discuss a novel scale to measure moral courage and strategies for cultivating it. The concept is particularly relevant to physicians in training who, due to the medical hierarchy and concerns about the impact of evaluations on future career options, may feel especially constrained from acting in accordance with their ethical convictions.

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Dangerous Medicine: Militarized Science And America’s Experiments With Hepatitis, Part I

Sydney A. Halpern, PhD
Lecturer, Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

For over thirty years, 1942 through 1974, American researchers conducted experiments that deliberately infected people with unmodified hepatitis viruses. The aim was to discover basic features of the pathogens, information necessary for developing preventive and therapeutic measures. The human subjects included mental patients, persons with cognitive impairments, conscientious objectors to the military draft, and inmates of prisons and reformatories. This talk presents major finding from a forthcoming book based on extensive archival research. It retells the story of human-subjects abuses in the U.S.

This talk, the first in a two-part series, locates the roots of the hepatitis studies—and other hazardous mid-century human experiments—with the rise of federal support of biomedicine for purposes of national defense. Scientists and their military sponsors invoked national security to justify dangerous medical research and secure the cooperation of those managing institutions housing potential subjects.