The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
Death With Dignity and the Uses of the Horrible
What precisely does “dignity” mean in the context of end-of-life decision-making? Does its meaning differ for the patient, for loved ones, for clinicians or bioethicists? The disturbing representation of a kind of assisted suicide in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film, Midsommar, makes an illuminating text for exploring the concept—widely used and poorly defined—of “death with dignity.” Taking Erving Goffman’s theatrical model of self-presentation as an invitation to apply the criteria of dramatic genre to the act of dying, I suggest that attention to horror, both an emotion we arguably associate with the opposite of dignity and a genre than enables us to test our ideas about good dying and its alternatives, enables us to consider how health care might identify and sustain a more flexible and ethical approach
to ways of dying.
Catherine Belling, PhD
Associate Professor, Medical Education
Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
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Myria Knox
(312) 503-7962
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