Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program

presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Michael Blackie, PhD
Associate Professor, Health Humanities
Department of Medical Education
University of Illinois at Chicago

Medicine’s WIT
This lecture will examine key differences between Margaret Edson’s play, WIT, and the film adaptation of it. WIT is the story a female patient undergoing aggressive treatment for advanced metastatic ovarian cancer and her eventual death from the disease. Although both the play and film have been widely used in medical education for discussing end-of-life issues, doctor-patient relationship, and the ethics associated with a patient’s code status, the film has become the preferred form. Creators of the Wit Film Project, an initiative sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that distributed the film along with teaching materials to medical universities, believe the film “should be required viewing for all stages of medical learners.” This preference is partly strategic. It is easier to screen the film than it is to stage or read the play. But there is more motivating this preference, this lecture will argue, than simply meeting the demands of a crowded medical curriculum. The film ultimately asks less of its audience because it converts the story of someone dying under the care of doctors into a story primarily about medicine.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Tod Chambers, PhD
Associate Professor, Medical Education
Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Putting Things Together and Pulling Them Apart:
Root Metaphors in Bioethics (lecture 1 of 2)

SPECIAL NOTE: These lectures assume familiarity with theory in bioethics.
These lectures will examine how forms of association (such as metaphor and analogy) and dissociation are crucial features to the way arguments are made persuasive in bioethics.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Tod Chambers, PhD
Associate Professor, Medical Education
Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Putting Things Together and Pulling Them Apart:
Association and Dissociation in Bioethics Arguments (lecture 2 of 2)

SPECIAL NOTE: These lectures assume familiarity with theory in bioethics.
These lectures will examine how forms of association (such as metaphor and analogy) and dissociation are crucial features to the way arguments are made persuasive in bioethics.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Christopher Lane, PhD
Professor of English
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Northwestern University

How a Hormone Was Sold as the ‘Moral Molecule’ That Would Save Humanity

From “cuddle chemical” to “moral molecule,” oxytocin has been lavished with descriptors that are scientifically misleading and inaccurate. Recent research even ties the hormone to race prejudice and ethno-nationalism, greatly complicating its contribution to neurobiological arguments about trust, altruism, and sociability. Even so, the hormone remains integral to current advocacy for “moral bio-enhancement,” a project built on heavy doses of idealism and promised empowerment whose actual effects, this talk argues, are more often disempowering, undemocratic, and prone to fail.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

presents

A Montgomery Lecture

Black Birth Matters:
The Weathering Hypothesis as a Challenge for Justice in Clinical Practice

Bioethicists frequently appeal to concepts of justice in their moral frameworks. For example, bioethical principlism holds that four principles – respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice – are sufficient for characterizing and resolving ethical dilemmas in medicine, using a process known as specification and balancing. Justice is usually appealed to in discussions of allocating health resources, such as allocating organs for transplant or allocating hospital beds in a pandemic. This presentation describes the weathering hypothesis put forward by Arline Geronimus to explain observed disparities in maternal and fetal outcomes for pregnant, black women and their babies. This talk also suggests that weathering presents a challenge to traditional appeals to justice in clinical bioethics; because, once a hypothesis like weathering has been substantiated by scientific observation, this creates an obligation to change health care practices to promote justice. That is, with the ample empirical support for the weathering hypothesis, I argue, hospitals and clinicians incur an obligation to alter practices to reduce these observed disparities precisely because they are unjust. This talk concludes by considering how hospitals and clinicians might alter practices to mitigate the effects of weathering and how ethical they might be.

Thomas V. Cunningham, PhD, MA, MS
Director, Bioethics
Kaiser Permanente