DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
As the Center continues to grow, we often get questions from people newly interested in the intriguing mix of health, ethics, arts, and humanities in our title. Something along the lines of: Yes, but what exactly do you do?
One of my favorite answers ever came by way of a holiday message just yesterday from a former student. About ten years ago, I worked with her and several other undergraduates on a project combining science and theatre, which culminated in a presentation at an Ethics Explored discussion. We have kept in touch as she decided to pursue a career in medicine. She is now finished with her training as a surgeon—a surgeon who maintains her interest in the arts.
This is exactly what we do. We work with students—and all learners!—who want to investigate, develop, and discuss the connections they see between healthcare experiences and all other experiences of being human. (See below for more about our award for medical student writing; stay tuned for more about a new undergraduate major in Fall 2025.) We support the idea that medical professionals need and want to draw on the knowledge generated in the arts and humanities as well as in scientific fields. We encourage the search for meaning and possibility in those places where traditional disciplines overlap.
You might already have experienced our interdisciplinary approach by attending our events or working with our faculty and staff. Perhaps you read and discuss with us at Literature and Healthcare each month; our 2025 booklist is below! Maybe you’ve attended an Ethics Explored discussion; our spring line-up includes ethics in times of catastrophe, what a clinical ethicist does, grief among physicians, and the first 100 days of healthcare in the new administration. You might have submitted your artwork or writing to Rubor or you just look forward to the annual issue. You might have attended “Healthcare Stories” at Kingsbury Hall. Please read on to learn more!
Even as we move into the winter holiday season, we are excited about all our plans for the new year and we hope you will join us.
-Gretchen Case
FACULTY NEWS
Gretchen Case performed a new original work, “Rules for Safety,” at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in September as part of a panel on clinical ethicist experiences. She also had a presentation, “Layers of Medicine,” and a poster, “From spectator to spectActor: Teaching medical providers to interrupt bias through Forum Theatre,” co-authored with Center affiliates Quang-Tuyen Nguyen, Karly Pippitt, and Candace Chow, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges in November.
Leslie and John Francis' article, titled "How, and When, Federalism Is Good for Public Health," was published in Harvard Public Health in September 2024.
Susan Sample's lyrical essay, titled "Afterlife," was published in Literature and Medicine in September 2024.
James Tabery and Arthur Caplan's article, titled "Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let's Not," was published in Scientific American in October 2024.
TRAVIS RIEDER, PhD
Director of Education Initiatives
Associate Research Professor
Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
Affiliate Faculty: Philosophy, Health Policy & Management
2024-25 COWAN-MAYDEN MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES
January 9, 2024
SERIES EVENTS
Department of Internal Medicine
Grand Rounds:
America's Opioid Dilemma: Persistent Ethical Questions in Addiction and Healthcare
12:00 PM
HELIX GS 150 Chokecherry & Live Broadcast
America’s most serious problem with prescription opioids is not the one that immediately comes to mind. It’s not just that they can lead to addiction, or even overdose. The problem is that opioids are both dangerous and highly effective at treating some kinds of severe pain. This means that the healthcare system needs to utilize opioid analgesia, but in the midst of a drug overdose crisis, that same system is afraid of these medications. The result is that clinicians risk under-treating pain (out of fear of opioids) and overprescribing opioids (because they want to be able to treat pain). In this talk, bioethicist and author Travis Rieder will use his own experience as a trauma patient to underscore the nature of this problem, and then explore some of the gaps in pain treatment, as well as how clinicians—and institutions—can close those gaps.
Ethics Explored:
Catastrophe Ethics: How to be Good in a World on Fire
5:30 PM
EHSEB 5750C & Zoom
We are surrounded by problems that are urgent and catastrophic—that seem to require a moral response by each of us—but which are too big and too complex to be solved by any individual. Climate change is the paradigm case of such a challenge. It occurs when billions of people engage in uncoordinated activity, emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, hundreds of billions of tons at a time. So what must each of us do, ethically, in response? Are you obligated not to buy a gas-guzzler and take it for joy rides while the world burns? These are the questions we’ll explore together in this discussion. And they are especially important, I’ll suggest, because climate change is far from the only case in which individual action can feel morally important and yet futile at the same time. Acting during an infectious disease outbreak, making consumer choices, engaging in politics, giving to charity, and responding to structural racism all have the potential to give rise to the puzzle of individual morality in an era of collective threats.
Short reading: https://time.com/6837533/catastrophe-ethics-essay/
Our Cowan-Mayden speaker, Travis Rieder, will also be presenting as part of the Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series. Please direct any questions to James Tabery.
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM SERIES
January 10, 2025
Catastrophe Ethics: Causal Inefficacy & the Possibility of Practical Moral Guidance
2:00 PM
CTIHB 459
For the last two decades, philosophers have debated whether the seeming fact that our individual actions cannot have a meaningful impact on pressing moral problems like climate change implies that we have no relevant duties. If, that is, no amount of refraining from flying will have a meaningful impact on the harms of climate change, could I really have a duty to reduce or eliminate luxury air travel? This is what is often called the problem of causal inefficacy. In this talk, I want to move past this discussion in order to focus on a related concern: namely, whether any account of individual moral responsibility in the face of massive, collective threats can generate actionable, practical guidance. The question is important, I argue, because if we rescue an account of moral responsibility in the face of catastrophe, the sheer number of constant catastrophes that we do or can contribute (infinitesimally) to implies an overwhelming moral responsibility to act in an overwhelming number of (often incompatible) ways. Thus, responding to causal inefficacy is not a solution to our moral life; it is a new problem. Here, I will address that new problem by proposing a novel framework for moral justification that can help us to understand and organize our responsibilities to respond to massive, collective threats.
MONICA LEMMON, MD
Associate Dean for Scientific Integrity
Department of Pediatrics and Population Health Sciences
Duke University School of Medicine
2024-25 GREEN MEMORIAL LECTURE SERIES
March 20, 2025
SERIES EVENTS
Pediatric Grand Rounds:
Talking about hard things: Challenges and opportunities in parent-clinician communication for critically ill children
8:00 AM
Primary Children's Third Floor Auditorium & Live Broadcast
In this session, we will discuss the context and stakes of conversations about hard topics like death and neurologic prognosis. We will explore what makes these conversations so challenging, and review evidence-based strategies for serious illness communication.
Ethics Explored:
Navigating grief: Taking care of ourselves and each other
5:30 PM
EHSEB 5750C & Zoom
Grief is a fundamental and necessary part of the human experience. Too little is known about how grief impacts healthcare professionals, who may be called upon to care for others while experiencing personal or professional loss. In this session, we will explore individual and systems-level strategies to support colleagues amidst personal and professional grief as well as some important ethical questions that arise: What unhelpful ideas persist about the role of emotion in a clinical setting? How can a clinician’s grief affect patient care? How and when should patients and families be made aware of grief or loss affecting their healthcare team? What are an institution’s responsibilities toward clinicians experiencing grief and loss?
JANUARY 8
If the Body Allows It: Stories by Megan Cummins
From our Facilitator, Sadie Hoagland, PhD, MA:
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame—about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath—are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they’ve lost everyone else, including themselves. Publisher’s Weekly writes of the book, “Cummins’s innovative work delivers well-crafted stories, vivid characters, and unsettling emotional gravitas.”
FEBUARY 12
The Medical Carnivalesque: Folklore among Physicians by Lisa Gabbert
From our Facilitator, Gretchen Case, PhD, MA:
To say that something is “carnivalesque” means that the usual rules and traditions are suspended and subverted, that what is usually taboo or inappropriate is allowed. In The Medical Carnivalesque, Utah State University professor Lisa Gabbert explores medicine as a community with its own folklore, ways of facing difficult situations, and particular moments of resistance to professional demands to be always proper and unflappable. Through this book, we will discuss hierarchies, how bonds form among providers, and the many uses of humor in medicine.
MARCH 12
Small Rain by Gath Greenwell
From our Facilitator, Sadie Hoagland, PhD, MA:
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Financial Times, New Statesman, Publishers Weekly, and BookPage, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is about a medical crisis that brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—and is a profound and luminous novel. A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. Meghan O’Rourke writes in the Yale Review: “An exquisite addition to the literature of illness . . . Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.”
APRIL 9
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
From our Facilitator, Mark Matheson, DPhil:
"The Tempest" is Shakespeare's last individually authored play. The exiled Duke Prospero lives on a remote island with his daughter Miranda and the slave Caliban. Prospero's magic brings his usurping enemies to his mercy, and what ensues is the memorable climax of this play about power, freedom, and forgiveness.
MAY 14
The Women by Kristen Hannah
From our Facilitator, Rachel Borup, PhD:
In her sweeping historical novel, The Women, Kristin Hannah shows readers a side of the Vietnam War that has been widely overlooked—the experiences of American military nurses. Hannah recenters the Vietnam War narrative on the lives of female nurses, specifically Francis “Frankie” McGrath, a young woman whose decision to enlist defies her conservative, wealthy family’s expectation that she follow a prim domestic path. In Vietnam, Frankie’s moral compass and skills as a nurse are tested far beyond anything she could have imagined in the country club. But Frankie’s psychological challenges only increase when she returns to a country that doesn’t want to think about the war, let alone women’s participation in it. Even the veterans’ support organizations Frankie seeks out after the war shun her with the appalling line, “There were no women in Vietnam.” Hannah’s novel argues otherwise.
JUNE 11
The Outrun: A Memoir by Amy Liptrot
From our Facilitator, Hailey Haffey, PhD:
“At the end of a winter, the land is brown and washed-out and the Outrun seems barren, but I know its secrets.”
Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun: A Memoir is a meditation on recovery from the traumas of addiction and a family history of mental illness set in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Raised on a farm on the largest Orkney, Liptrot documents her journey from London back to her remote family home, which is situated between a sandy strand of beach near the Stone Age village Skara Brae and rugged, heather-bordered cliffs that lead to a sparse grazing field for ewes and Highland cattle. From this harsh agricultural space, the Outrun, Liptrot weaves a daunting landscape into sensuous prose that anchors her depiction of a journey through substance use disorder in metaphors of often unforgiving and endurance-testing agricultural life.
Informal, multidisciplinary discussions about current issues in healthcare ethics
1.5 credits CME
Rubor: Reflections on Medicine from the Wasatch Front is a student-run arts and humanities publication supported by the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities, the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine Office of Curriculum and Office of Admission, the Associated Students of the University of Utah, and the Eccles Health Science Library.
Anyone in healthcare is invited to submit their work.
The University of Utah's Center for Health Ethics, Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce our annual Award for Written Scholarship in Medical Ethics, given to a medical student who writes the most compelling and innovative essay on an issue in medical ethics, as judged by our Center faculty. The winning student will receive a cash prize of $1500, assistance with editing their manuscript for publication, and public recognition.
We are deeply grateful to the committed faculty member who endowed this award and wishes to remain anonymous. Deadline for submission: March 15, 2025. Other details can be found at the embedded link above.
Every year, the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities is delighted to work closely with the Resiliency Center to bring a special evening of real stories about human experiences of healthcare to the big stage at Kingsbury Hall. This February, we have invited six people from our community to tell their own compelling stories. We hope you will come and listen!
Looking for a last-minute gift idea? Experiences can often impact more than an object. Why not gift your loved ones a night of live storytelling that celebrates health, joy, and the human spirit? This year, extend your season of joy until after the holidays and buy tickets to Healthcare Stories: Joy. U of U faculty and staff may use the code FACULTYUP for a 20% discount. Student tickets are $5 with ID.
Join us on February 6th at Kingsbury Hall for a night of unscripted, real-life stories about health and healthcare. We hope to see you and someone special in the audience.
This event is put on in collaboration with U of U Health and UtahPresents.
