DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
Friends and Colleagues,
As 2025 ends, we are especially thankful for our partnership with Associate Vice President for Health Sciences Education Dr. Wendy Hobson-Rohrer, who is taking a sabbatical leave in 2026. Her office helped us navigate the move to University Center status in 2021 and made it possible for continue our educational programs through many transformational changes at the U.
We’ve continued to offer our Award for Written Scholarship in Medical Ethics for medical students submissions open now. We gifted books to graduate and professional students across the health sciences, including all 2025 graduates of the Physician Assistant Program and all incoming medical residents, across disciplines.
Please join us in the new year for more excellent educational experiences open to all. We will be hosting historian Johanna Schoen from Johns Hopkins University as our Green Memorial Speaker and philosopher of health Sean Valles from Michigan State University as our Cowan-Mayden Memorial Speaker.
As part of our longstanding Ethics Explored series, we will have nationally known experts leading our discussions of new developments in caring for children with Trisomy-18, understanding moral distress in NICUs, and the place of humility in public health strategies.
Literature and Healthcare discussion series, which has been running for most of the 35 years we’ve existed at the U, will include prose and poetry by local authors and colleagues Joni Hemond and Susan Sample, as well as the television phenomenon that is “The Pitt.” You might make a special effort to attend discussions led by Mark Matheson, who tells us this will be his last year as a facilitator. We will have a special in-person session in December 2026 to celebrate all that Mark has given to our program.
With our longtime collaborators at UtahPresents, we are co-producing the live annual storytelling event Healthcare Stories: Together in March and co-sponsoring a special event, Arms Around America in April.
Looking far forward to Spring 2027, we are delighted to announce that we will host the annual meeting of the Health Humanities Consortium, the first time this conference has been held in the Mountain West. More information to come about how you can participate.
We are grateful for your support, which makes our work possible and visible. I am always moved to hear from you and share your messages with everyone here at the Center. Please reach out anytime directly to me or to our Center email.
We hope that your winter holidays are joyful and restful!
Gretchen
2025-26 David Green Memorial Lecturer
Johanna Schoen is distinguished professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of two books: Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and Abortion After Roe (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015). She is now working on a book, Life and Death in the Nursery, on the history of Neonatal Intensive Care Units for which she received a 3-year research grant from the NIH/NLM.
Save the date:
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Pediatric Grand Rounds
The Pain Debate in Neonatology
This talk will explore the history of anesthesia and pain control offered, or more importantly, not offered, to neonates in hospitals. In the 1980s in the US, parents began to protest the lack of attention to neonatal pain and clinicians began to systematically research how to assess and address neonatal pain. But it took another decade for clinical care to routinely address neonatal pain, as most clinicians held to the belief that neonates did not experience pain and if they did, they did not remember it. This talk will explore the history of anesthesia and pain control offered, or more importantly, not offered to neonates in hospitals.
8:00 AM
Hybrid Event:
In-person: Primary Children's Hospital, Third Floor Auditorium
Virtual: Live Broadcast
Ethics Explored Discussion
Moral Distress in the NICU
Led by historian Johanna Schoen, we will discuss how aggressive resuscitation and care in the NICU often has led to moral distress among parents and clinicians. We will reflect on past practices as we consider the ethical concerns faced by everyone caring for neonates. A short reading will be provided to prepare us.
12:00 PM
Hybrid Event:
In-person: TBD
Virtual: Zoom
2025-26 Max & Sara Cowan Memorial & Priscilla M. Mayden Endowed Lecturer
Sean A. Valles, PhD, is Professor and Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Justice. A philosopher of health, his work focuses on the social roots of health disparities and ethical challenges in public health. He writes on the use of race in health research, pandemic preparedness, and the connections between biomedicine and public health. He is the author of Philosophy of Population Health and co-editor of the Bioethics for Social Justice book series.
Save the date:
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Internal Medicine Grand Rounds
Ethics and Concepts of Race in Medicine: The Importance of Foregrounding Racism Rather than Race
Recently, Jay Bhattacharya, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, argued that studying structural racism as a cause of health disparities is not a viable avenue for understanding or improving those disparities. This assertion draws a mistaken conclusion from the decades of scientific debates seeking to resolve the question of what role(s) race concepts ought to play in biomedical research and clinical practice. The race-in-medicine debates have long fought over how to address disparities, such as relatively poor cardiovascular health outcomes among Black Americans. Critics have worried that focusing on disparities between racialized groups relies too heavily on race concepts that were created as (now-obsolete) biological concepts, and whose use can only obscure the real causes of and solutions to health disparities. In light of those critiques, the shift toward attributing health disparities to racism—rather than to race itself—is in fact the most promising way of moving past those debates. While race categories are indeed imprecise, a shift toward foregrounding racism allows researchers and clinicians alike greater clarity regarding specific causes of health disparities—e.g., chronic stress due to fear of aggressive policing tactics used in predominantly Black neighborhoods—and how best to respond to those disparities in research and in clinical practice.
12:00 PM
Hybrid Event:
In-person: HELIX building - Chokecherry conference room, GS150
Virtual: Livestream
Ethics Explored Discussion
The Missing Humility in Current Public Health Strategies to Make Neighborhoods Healthier
Among peer wealthy democracies, the United States has infamously poor health overall, and especially large gaps between segments of its populations, including between neighborhoods. The vast disparities between Americans living in different neighborhoods have inspired decades of scholarship and policy proposals aiming at improving health overall and narrowing health gaps between different communities. Taking a sharp turn, the current US political administration has now embraced a public health strategy called "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA). This strategy has been defended as a necessary corrective to past failures to improve US health outcomes. We will begin the discussion with a presentation by philosopher of health Sean Valles, who will argue that this strategy is doomed to failure due to a number of strategic missteps, with one overarching problem being that the MAHA strategy lacks humility. We will discuss the contrast between past and present approaches to improving health outcomes. The need for humble, community-grounded, and collaborative approaches to public health improvement have been some of the most important and hard-learned lessons of the history of public health. By contrast, the MAHA movement has sought to impose a top-down agenda that devalues local community participation and offers contradictory policy proposals.
5:30 PM
Hybrid Event:
In-person: TBD
Virtual: Zoom
JANUARY 14
How to Be Well by Amy Larocca
From our Facilitator, Sadie Hoagland, PhD, MA:
A Kirkus Best Book of 2025, Amy Larocca’s How to Be Well is a deeply researched, lively, and personal exploration of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry. Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here, and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women's lives? Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “Penetrating and thought-provoking, this will cause readers to think twice before reaching for the latest purported cure-all.”
Informal, multidisciplinary discussions about current issues in healthcare ethics
1.5 credits CME
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 16, 2025. Other details can be found at the embedded link above.
Congratulations to MD/PhD candidate Justin Campbell, who received a Special Commendation for Bioethics Scholarship in last year’s Award competition and who’s manuscript was published in the journal of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery!
Healthcare Stories | Kingsbury Hall | Mar 5, 2026 @ 7:00 pm
Healthcare Stories is an annual storytelling event that happens live and on-stage at Kingsbury Hall. Produced by the Resiliency Center, the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities, and UtahPresents, Healthcare Stories endeavors to foster community and connection through the act of sharing unscripted, healthcare themed stories.
This year’s theme is “Together”— all the ways we connect with each other within communities and between communities to address shared challenges, goals, and desires.
Arms Around America | Kingsbury Hall | April 9, 2026 @ 7:30 pm & April 10, 2026 @ 7:30 pm
Los Angeles-based theater group Dan Froot & Company’s Arms Around America is based on stories of families whose lives have been shaped by guns. Book-length oral histories of families in South Florida, Western Montana, and Southern California were transformed into audio dramas that became a podcast and eventually a live show. Stage and Cinema called it, “an all-around fabulous evening of unconventional live theatre.”
By opening a window into these families’ lives, Dan Froot & Company explore diverse perspectives and foster dialogue around the complex roles that guns play in our society. Their hope is that this project can help us all learn how to maintain each other’s humanity when discussing divisive topics. AAA received a prestigious National Theater Project award and commissions from the National Performance Network and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.
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