Medical practitioners, medical ethicists, and patients have all contributed to conversations about the moral complexity of making decisions in the presence of uncertainty.  We find these writers as well as literary artists pressing their concerns in a time when medicine paradoxically aligns itself with scientific methods designed to ensure predictability, while scientific discoveries enable us to live in ambiguous states of health, illness, viability, and individual and human identity.  To understand ethical responses to medical uncertainties, we will bring the emerging field of literature and medicine together with recent scholarship in narrative ethics and medical ethics, a discipline that is itself constituted by narratives.  We will read a cluster of literary works, medical texts, and bioethics cases concerning each of the medical topics we will take up.  These topics might include end-of-life care, diseases that elude diagnosis, chronic and disabling conditions that leave one in a state between health and illness, pain, surgical alterations (such as facial repairs), and genetic alterations.  Since reading literary texts immerses us in the experience of making interpretations in the presence of uncertainty (as medical practitioners and patients often do) and foregrounds attentiveness as an essential ethical value, these texts will be indispensable to our study beyond their representation of medical topics and ethical claims.  Reading literature will, therefore, offer us layered and nuanced understandings of the ethical matters we discuss and will ask us to examine our own uncertainty or trust when we become witnesses to another’s account of suffering. 
 

Your will turn in several short think sheets and a short analytical essay during the semester and complete a research or creative writing project by the end of the semester.