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The Ethical Imperative of Medical Humanities

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Abstract

Medical humanities purchases its presence on the medical side of university campuses by adopting as its own the ends of medicine and medical ethics. It even justifies its presence by asserting promotion of those ends as an ethical imperative, most of all to improve the caring in medical care. As unobjectionable, even praiseworthy, as this imperative appears, it actually constrains the possibilities for interpersonal relationship in the context of medical practice. Development of those possibilities requires openness of self to the existentially challenging ethical imperative to care also literally for nothing at all.

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Notes

  1. R. Carson, “Engaged Humanities,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50 (2007): 325. As history, Carson’s essay is notable for how completely he blurs any distinction between medical ethics and medical humanities, beginning with the title itself.

  2. V. Bishop, “Rejecting Medical Humanism,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 21.

  3. For overview of themes in Foucault’s later writings see A. Frank and T. Jones, “Bioethics and the Later Foucault,” Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (2003): 179-186 and A. Petersen, “Governmentality;” A. Peterson et al., “The Medical Humanities Today;” and H.M. Evans, “Affirming the Existential within Medicine,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008).

  4. See N. Luxon, “Ethics and Subjectivity,” Political Theory 36 (2008): 377-402.

  5. See L. Davis and D. Morris, “Biocultures Manifesto,” New Literary History 38 (2007): 411-418.

  6. See C. Ells, “Foucault, Feminism, and Informed Choice,” Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (2003): 213-228.

  7. J. Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 164.

  8. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 45.

  9. Augustine, Confessions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 258.

  10. S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 74.

  11. L. Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 649.

  12. S. Weil, Gravity and Grace, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27.

  13. Ibid, 110.

  14. S. Sontag, Ilness as Metaphor, (New York: Picador, 1990), 36.

  15. Rorty, Contingency, xv and 146.

  16. Ibid, 65.

  17. I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, (New York: Routledge, 1970), 86.

  18. Many thanks to Dan Brauner and Caitjan Gainty for commentary on drafts of this essay, as well as the organizers, fellow participants, and audience at the concluding panel “The Future of Medical Humanities,” at the ASBH Spring Meeting 2009, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where a first draft of this essay was presented.

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Correspondence to Geoffrey Rees.

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Rees, G. The Ethical Imperative of Medical Humanities. J Med Humanit 31, 267–277 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9118-0

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