| These lectures address 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. |
.  | | Megan Crowley-Matoka, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Anthropology
VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion
University of Pittsburgh
Visiting Faculty, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics
The University of Chicago |
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Thursday, May 14, 2009 Pain management is a notoriously contentious area of clinical practice, one where physicians and patients often feel pitted against one another and filled with frustration. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, Dr. Crowley-Matoka explores the emotional registers and narrative genres that emerge in how physicians talk about their experiences with pain and pain patients. From “getting burned” stories to vividly somaticized expressions of distaste and distress, much of this talk works to shift focus from the pain of the patient to the discomfort of the physician. This is a discursive move with critical clinical and ethical implications, and one which calls us—this talk suggests—to take seriously claims to suffering on both sides of the clinical relationship.
. Dr. Crowley-Matoka also presented the MH&B Special Topics lecture “The Patient Who Is Not?: Conceptual and Ethical Quandaries in Living Organ Donation” on April 2, 2009. | | |
