Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

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

Haunted Doctors: Clinician Trauma, Emotion, and the Weird 

The idea of being “haunted” appears often in accounts of the experience of health-care professionals and trainees suffering from unresolved sorrow or regret about past clinical events, especially the deaths of patients. This eerie metaphor captures two important, and arguably underemphasized, components of clinical practice: emotion and uncertainty. I’ll suggest that doctors’ work is, in several senses, weird, and that medicine might benefit from paying closer attention to the etiologies and manifestations of its ghosts.

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Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

Joanne Jacobson, PhD
Professor Emerita of English
Yeshiva University
New York, NY

Wounded Literacy: Writing Hospital Time 

This talk will consider hospitalization and the imperatives of writing about hospitalization from the patient’s point of view. Approached as an immigration site—what Mary-Louis Pratt has called a “contact zone”—the hospital emerges as a site of competing literacies; the patient’s experience one of wounded literacy, of disruption of such fundamental markers as time and spatial boundaries and personal identity. In turn, out of this experience emerge for the patient both the imperatives of writing and the challenges of creating narrative. My approach will be to put into dialogue with one another this critical analysis and personal writing from my essay collection, coming out this fall from The University of Utah Press, Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses.  

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Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

Noelle Sullivan, PhD
Associate Professor of Instruction
Program in Global Health Studies
Northwestern University

Creating Moral Commodities: 
Marketing in the For-Profit Global Health Volunteering Industry

Global health travel interest has spiked over the last two decades. In response to the demand by students in particular, hundreds of international “voluntourism” companies have emerged. These companies offer placements in health facilities in the so-called Global South where students can intern, complete an elective, or volunteer. As public debates about the ethics of “voluntourism” have become common, companies have responded by advertising themselves as providing ethical, safe, and worthwhile placements where students can help “make a difference” in under-resourced health facilities. Yet in spite of companies’ advertising pivot emphasizing the impact and ethical nature of their projects, the industry nonetheless creates an enabling environment for unethical engagements and practices that undermine the safety and quality of health care. This talk emerges from Sullivan’s book manuscript in progress, The Business of Good Intentions: Reframing the Global Health Volunteering Debate, based on ethnographic and online research undertaken from 2008-2017.

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Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

Public Health Pressures and Ethical Tradeoffs in a Pandemic

This session will feature two separate but thematically-linked talks, each examining different examples of the ethics of public health decision-making under the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Expanding Access in a Pandemic: Ethical Tradeoffs With Taking Shortcuts 
This talk will examine different ways to shorten the process of testing vaccines and treatments, and discuss how they compare based on speed of access, physical risks/benefits for individuals, and social risks.
Seema K. Shah, JD 
Associate Professor, Founder’s Board Professor of Medical Ethics
Lurie Children’s Hospital, Department of Pediatrics, 
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Associate Director of Research Ethics, Lurie Children’s Hospital

Mandatory Flu Vaccine for In-Person School Attendance in the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Influenza immunization should be required for children attending in-person school during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main reasons are: the inability to readily separate symptoms of flu versus those of COVID-19, leading to difficulties identifying and isolating those carrying the SARS-COV-2 virus, and the importance of social solidarity for protecting others in the community.
Joel E. Frader, MD, MA
Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

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Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

M. Jeanne Wirpsa, MA BCC HEC-C
Clinical Ethicist and Program Manager, Medical Ethics
Research Chaplain, Spiritual Care and Education
Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Faculty, MacLean Center for Clinical Ethics
Religion, Bioethics and Medicine
University of Chicago

Religious Exceptionalism in Healthcare: Is it Defensible?

Patients, clinicians, and healthcare institutions appeal to moral claims embedded in religious traditions to request or refuse medical interventions. Accommodation for religion is granted a privileged status by the religious liberty clause of the First Amendment. The creation of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division under the US Department of Health and Human Services and high-profile court cases asserting the right to gather to worship during the COVID pandemic, among other recent political events, suggests growing support for religious exceptionalism in healthcare.  When clinical ethicists confront real-life cases involving religious claims -- from family refusal to accept death by neurological criteria, patient requests for products free of porcine or bovine components, pleas to "do everything" to give God time to work a miracle for a dying loved one, or clinician recusal from caring for a patient post gender transformation surgery -- the stakes of religious exceptionalism are high. As bioethicist Dan Sulmasy argues, these cases call for the exercise of epistemic moral humility in medicine, even as limits on accommodations may need to be set if they present an undue burden or threaten the common good.

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