DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
Welcome to Fall 2024! Going forward, we will be publishing only two issues of this newsletter each year to better align with the academic calendar and help you plan to join us for our events.
We especially welcome all the students who have joined our community recently. We have launched a new listserv, especially for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who have expressed interest in bioethics, medical ethics, health and medical humanities, and arts in health. This listerv will provide an important connection for students who might, for example, be pursuing a career in medicine, following an interdisciplinary research interest, curious about what a clinical ethicist does, or simply looking for like-minded peers and colleagues.
An important part of our mission as a University-wide Center is to serve as an educational resource for all students. When we receive information about volunteer or professional opportunities, scholarships, contests, and events that are expressly for students, we want to be able to share that news effectively and efficiently. We are planning future events that will address the interests expressed by students who answered our survey in late 2023.
If you are a student at the U, please join the listserv; we promise to keep the emails streamlined and not too frequent. Faculty and staff, please send us your interested students!
SPECIAL THANKS
We at the Center were honored to receive a bequest from Dr. Neil Kochenour, who passed away in November 2023. Dr. Kochenour was an innovative and talented physician, who helped establish maternal-fetal medicine and a fetal diagnostic center at the University of Utah and was a valued member of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He was also kind and compassionate, with lifelong attention to the ethical considerations that accompany a career in medicine. He described himself as a humanitarian and a lover of the arts. His thoughtful gift will have a significant impact for the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities. I feel lucky that I had a chance to spend some time with Dr. Kochenour and am moved by his faith that we can continue the hard but important work in medical ethics and humanities that he valued during his career.
FACULTY NEWS
Peggy Battin's new book, Sex and the Planet: What Opt-In Reproduction Could Do for the Globe, was published by MIT Press in May 2024.
What if human reproduction were always elective? A prominent bioethicist speculates about the possibilities—and the likely consequences.
A new book by Leslie P. Francis and John G. Francis, 'States of Health: The Ethics and Consequences of Policy Variation in a Federal System,' was published by Oxford University Press in May 2024.
“This book engages with the ethics and consequences of policy variation in a federal system. The book discusses the extraordinary range of policies about health and health care in the US, and the truly shocking differences in health outcomes that are associated with these policy differences. We argue that there are advantages to federalism, including possibilities for experimentation and for avoiding the worst case of national bans on ethically controversial care, but that these advantages will only be realized if people can readily move outside of their home states and if national minimums are achieved.”
Gretchen Case's guest post on "Good Notes," a blog that features expert perspectives from U of U leaders and collaborators, discusses the intersection of the arts, humanities, and healthcare and the work we do at the Center.
Brent Kious appears in an episode of "A State of Mind: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis in Wyoming." A series created by PBS Wyoming to investigate answers to Wyoming's mental health crisis, this documentary series follows patient journeys through a combination of expert interviews and observations from regular people.
Madison Kilbride's research article, titled “Test-Takers’ Perspectives on Consumer Genetic Testing for Hereditary Cancer Risk,” was published in Frontiers in Genetics in July 2024.
Susan Sample’s recently published poems include: "I Dream of a Needle," "Articulate, Please," and "When the Screen Retracts." They will appear later this year in Ars Medica, Canada's first medical humanities journal. Each presents a different perspective—an educator, writer, and daughter—on end-of-life issues.
Leslie Francis’ post on “Bill of Health,” a blog that examines the intersection of health, law, biotechnology, and bioethics highlights Louisiana's new law classifying misoprostol and mifepristone as illegal without a prescription for non-abortion uses, a move that continues to fuel legal debates despite the Supreme Court's recent rejection of a challenge to the FDA's approval of these drugs.
FALL SERIES
SUSAN SAMPLE, PhD, MFA
Director of Initiative in Narrative, Medicine, and Health
Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities
Writer-in-Residence
Huntsman Cancer Institute
2024-25 HEALTH HUMANITIES LECTURESHIP
Each year the Center hosts a distinguished expert in the arts and humanities as they relate to healthcare and health education.
SAVE THE DATES:
November 20-22,2024
This informal group is facilitated by expert faculty and meets monthly to discuss books and other texts that address health and healthcare.
2nd Wednesdays, 6-7:30 pm
AUGUST 14
Book: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
From our Facilitator, Mark Matheson, DPhil:
I look forward very much to our August discussion of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). It will be interesting to consider Woolf’s treatment of trauma in this work, which she wrote precisely one hundred years ago. The novel is set on a single day in London in the summer of 1923. The debacle of the Great War is in the immediate background, and it deeply influences the society of the novel and the lives of its individual characters. Most notable in this respect is Septimus Warren Smith, an English soldier who is profoundly shell-shocked by the War and who five years later is struggling to survive. Clarissa Dalloway is the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, and she spends the day reflecting on her past and preparing for the society party she gives that evening. She does not meet Septimus Warren Smith, but their lives are parallel in certain respects, and the news of his fate reaches her party near the end of the novel. The book offers significant criticism of the medical establishment in England during the 1920s, and this is clearly based on Woolf’s personal experience as she sought help for her own mental illnesses, which were debilitating throughout her life. Sir William Bradshaw is the suave Harley Street doctor who sees Septimus Warren Smith midway through the novel, and there is great intensity in Woolf’s writing and characterization in this passage. We’ve recently read a number of up-to-date books about trauma--by Bessel van der Kolk, Stephanie Foo, and others—and it will be valuable to compare Woolf’s exploration of this phenomenon in her classic novel. It’s a beautifully written work, and in addition to appreciating its strong medical interest, I hope you enjoy the aesthetic experience that reading Mrs. Dalloway offers.
SEPTEMBER 11
Essays: The Aquarium & People Like That are the Only People Here
by Aleksander Hemon (2011) & Lorrie Moore (1997)
From our Facilitators Sadie Hoagland, PhD, MA & Rachel Borup, PhD:
Aleksandar Hemon's The New Yorker essay, "The Aquarium," is a heart-wrenching and honest depiction of his infant daughter's diagnosis of, and decline from, brain cancer. Hemon frankly describes the effects of the grief and stress on his wife and himself, how isolated such a tragedy rendered them despite well-wisher's best intentions, and how their older child coped with the situation. While emotionally difficult to read, this essay is beautifully written and offers an honesty and openness invaluable to understanding this tragic experience from the patient's family's perspective.
"People Like That Are the Only People Here,” by Lorrie Moore, is a semi-autobiographical short story told from the point of view of a mother whose baby is diagnosed with renal cancer. The characters are not given names but are identified by their roles—the Mother, the Baby, and the Radiologist—which makes the story feel experimental but also archetypal and universal; these characters might be any of us. The mother’s terror and rage at this unthinkable situation propel the story, and, because the author is Lorrie Moore, it is also told with her unique brand of dark humor and sharp observations about love, art, and human nature.
OCTOBER 9
Book: The Answers: A Novel by Catherine Lacey
From our Facilitator, Sadie Hoagland, PhD, MA:
In Catherine Lacey's "The Answers," protagonist Mary Parsons is deep in medical debt from a mysterious illness when she finds relief through a homeopathic procedure that, while it works, only exacerbates her financial stress. It's from this desperate position that she takes on a second job as an "emotional girlfriend," for a wealthy actor who has hired a team of biotech researchers to refine his relationships for him (he also has a "maternal girlfriend," and an "anger girlfriend"). The New York Times writes of the book: "This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds . . . Lacey's special gift is for capturing the realistic flickering of individual consciousness." It should make for an interesting discussion to say the least!
NOVEMBER 13
Book: The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila, MD
From our Facilitator, Hailey Haffey, PhD:
The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine is physician Ricardo Nuila’s recounting of his work at Ben Taub, a safety-net hospital in Houston, Texas–and the city’s “largest hospital for the poor.” Nuila’s story in The People’s Hospital illustrates the individual and systemic transformations in health care that characterize Ben Taub, which keeps costs affordable while providing quality services for uninsured and insured patients alike. Nuila reveals this public hospital’s dynamics of resilience and innovation through a lens that centers five unique patients and their health stories within the context of core dilemmas that persist in medicine today–including costs, coverage, quality, bias, excess, and access.
DECEMBER 11
Book: Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change the World
by Sarah DiGregorio
From our Facilitator, Maureen Mathison, PhD:
Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change our World by Sarah DiGregorio is an insightful read about the history and social contexts of nursing. As primary caretakers in a variety of settings today, nurses have been instrumental since Neolithic times, well before there was a name for the care they provided. DiGregorio provides a glimpse of the medical and interpersonal work nurses have been doing through the ages and gives them the recognition they deserve.
