Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Anna Fenton-Hathaway, PhD
Managing Editor, Literature and Medicine
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Dystopia Medicine

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) became the top-selling book at Amazon in January of this year, and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) rose to the top ten of the same list in February. Classic dystopias—not to mention newer, young adult versions such as The Hunger Games (2008-10) and Divergent (2011-13) trilogies—are hot these days. While the surge of interest in these tales is most readily explained by new political realities, two essays in a recent issue of Literature and Medicine prompted me to ask how health care functions in, or even helps to define, these imagined worlds—and to explore the ways those and other dystopias are being used by health professionals and health policymakers to shape real-world medicine.