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Our faculty presents weekly lectures during The Graduate School's Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters every Thursday from noon to 12:50pm in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie building. Due to public interest, we have made these lectures open to all, inside and outside the Northwestern community. Please feel free to bring a lunch. Beginning this year, we are recording these lectures and making them available online. These recordings are playable in iTunes and include the presentation slides in sync with the audio. More information is available here. | Key to recording symbols: | |  | Available | |  | Will be available soon | |  | Will not be made available | | (More information) |
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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? | | |
