| 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. |
| | |  | | Katie Watson, JD
Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Feinberg School of Medicine
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
Medically-oriented movies, plays, and TV shows inspire the ire of physicians, medical ethicists, and medical educators when they aren’t medically accurate. An underlying (but rarely examined) assumption of these critiques is that authors of medical fiction have higher ethical obligations to their audiences than other writers. In this lecture, Professor Watson will explore the ethics of the Author-Audience relationship: Are writers of medical dramas ethically obligated to get the science right in a way that writers of leaping car chases in action films aren’t? Do writers of medical dramas have an ethical responsibility to tell stories that are representative of the majority's experience with a particular illness? Is there no such thing as “pure entertainment” when the subject is medicine?
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