Robert Coles' sentiment characterizes well the moral tenor of medical education today. Indeed, medical educators are frequently “seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness,” as they try to cope with the massive social and economic problems that face medical schools and teaching hospitals. The perception among educators that we currently fail to adequately teach several core aspects of doctoring, including professional values and behavior, constitutes one such spasm. In this case, the proposed remedy has generated considerable enthusiasm, but whether the (...) “core competencies” curriculum will make a difference, or simply “accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit,” remains to be seen. (shrink)

Saggar recalled a patient who … asked, “Doctor, do you really think I have COVID?” At that point, Saggar wasn’t sure. He told him they were being “extra cautious.” About 10 days later, the patient was dead. “That still haunts me,” Saggar said.Infectious disease specialist Dr. Suraj Saggar says he is “haunted”. We cannot tell precisely what haunts him: the death of his patient, or his in-ability, 10 days earlier, to say for certain whether the patient was infected with the (...) new coronavirus. Probably the two merge, so that for him the sadness and horror we all feel when a person we know suddenly dies is inseparable from the particular guilty grief he feels as a doctor, not simply for being unable to save a... (shrink)

By dying, after three hours of dithering, Hamlet has finally asserted his manhood…– John Lahr, “Indecision 2008” To be, or not to be….– William Shakespeare, HamletThe word decision (like the word i...

The victim’s upper brain is destroyed. He’s a living corpse, but his organs are alive and warm and happy until they can be taken out by the butchers at the Institute. Karen Ann Quinlan wasn’t dead. But, terrifyingly, she wasn’t fully alive, either. Maybe she was no longer human. A smear like “death panels” emerges and catches fire because it’s fundamentally interesting. You could write a great thriller . . . about death panels. As I write, a single phrase dominates (...) public discussion of health-care reform in the United States: “death panels.” Its power cannot lie in its referential accuracy or be diminished by arguing, even with irrefutable evidence, that it is a misrepresentation. The .. (shrink)

The relationships between socioeconomic and biogenetic reproduction are always socially constructed but not always acknowledged. These relationships are examined as they apply to an instance of infertility and assisted reproduction presented in a seventeenth-century English play, Thomas Middleton’s 1613 comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Middleton’s satirization of the effects of secrecy on the category of reproductive disability is analyzed and its applicability to our own time considered. The discussion is in four parts, focusing on: the attribution of disabled status (...) to one member of the couple, the wife; the use of this attribution to protect the husband’s reputation for sexual and reproductive health; the concealment of the nature of assisted reproduction; and the interests of the child conceived with such assistance. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the purpose of humanities teaching within medical education should be primarily to teach and promote the informed, attentive, critical, and precise reading of the multiple texts that constitute medicine as a discursive field—in short, a poetics of medicine. This claim is illustrated by reconsidering Margaret Edson’s play Wit, not as it is often used in medical education, as a cautionary tale about unprofessional behavior or as a way to inculcate “humanistic skills,” but as an analysis of (...) the relationships between texts and feelings—or cognition and emotion, or science and art. This reading is illustrated by comparing the poetics of Wit with those of two other texts representing ovarian cancer: a scientific paper in Oncology and a clinical case conference in JAMA. (shrink)