| These lectures address diverse topics within bioethics and the medical humanities. Speakers are MH&B faculty or special guests we've invited to present. The lectures run every Thursday from noon to 12:45pm in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie building, during The Graduate School's fall, winter, and spring quarters. Due to public interest, we've made these lectures open to all, inside and outside the Northwestern community. Please feel free to bring a lunch. |
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Thursday, April 3 We want to practice medicine "well." We want to be "good" at it. But what count as the measuring sticks, so to speak? One view would hold that what medicine is, as a practice, has been with us for as long as there have been physicians. A quite different view is that what medicine is is a result of a social construction. Each society, therefore, has great latitude in how it defines (and thus evaluates) medical practice. Far from being purely "academic," this question is actually quite pressing: Should physicians participate in cloning? Should fertility treatment or "enhancement medicine" properly be considered part of the practice of medicine? This lecture will explore the two alternative views of how medicine is defined, and will emphasize what is at stake in the debate. .
Thursday, April 10 Preserving life, reducing suffering, or to put it another way "reducing morbidity and mortality" are commonly mentioned as central goals of medical practice. But, do we really practice medicine in the US with these goals in mind? In fact, the current US health system would, in many ways, seem to be ineffective and irrational in its practice if these are in fact our goals. So, are these our goals and thus we behave irrationally? Or are the central goals of medicine quite different from those mentioned? | | |
