“Dying Well”: Enacting Medical Ethics
Event Date: 26 September 2015
Barts Pathology Museum
Robin Brook Centre
West Smithfield
London EC1A 7BE
“DYING WELL”: ENACTING MEDICAL ETHICS
A cross-disciplinary Symposium at Barts Pathology Museum
This symposium adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to ongoing debates on end-of-life care. Medical professionals, lawyers, ethicists, policy makers, humanities scholars, cultural practitioners and patient representatives will come together to consider what it might mean in today’s world to ‘die well’.
The springboard for this event is Arthur Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi (1912), which will be performed in a new adaptation at Barts Pathology Museum on 23-25 September. The play focuses on a Jewish doctor who prevents a Catholic priest from giving the last rites to a patient who is unaware that she is dying, and takes a wry look at some of the ways in which death is embroiled in wider social structures: cultural, political and religious.
The symposium takes up key questions posed by Schnitzler’s unlikely comedy and explores them from a contemporary perspective, in four panels addressing socio-cultural responses to the challenges of biomedicine; bodily practices and embodied knowledge; faith, conscience and the role of doctors; and current institutional perspectives on end-of-life care.
Distinguished speakers include Baroness Ilora Finlay, Professor Jonathan Montgomery and Dr Samir Guglani.
Theatre performance and symposium both take place in Barts Pathology Museum in London’s West Smithfield, at the heart of the historic Barts Hospital site. This remarkable space, in which over 5000 medical specimens are displayed, is not normally accessible to the public.
The symposium is a collaboration between the Schnitzler Digital Edition Project, based at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol and UCL; UCL Health Humanities Centre; and the theatre company [Foreign Affairs].
Saturday, 26 September 2015
Programme
9.00 – 9.30am Registration
9.30 – 9.40am Welcome and Introduction
9.40-10.45am Panel 1: Socio-Cultural Responses to the Ethical Challenges of Biomedicine
Dr Julia Boll (Department of Literature, University of Konstanz) – The Object’s Voice: Literature’s Attempt to Create Subjectivity
Susan Watts (Head of Public Engagement and Communications, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre) - What can “Living Well” teach us about “Dying Well”?
Respondents: Members of the [Foreign Affairs] theatre company
10.45 – 11.15am Coffee Break
11.15 – 12.30pm Panel 2: Bodily Practices and Embodied Knowledge
Dr Samir Guglani (Consultant Oncologist and Director of Medicine Unboxed) - Human Voices
Prof Tom Corby (Professor of Visual and Interdisciplinary Art, University of Westminster) - Blood and Bones
Respondent: Dr Fiona MacCormick
12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch
1.30 – 2.45pm Panel 3: Faith, Conscience and the Role of Doctors
Prof Jonathan Montgomery (Faculty of Laws, UCL) - Conscientious Objection, Professional Ethics and the Public Sphere
Dr Mary Neal (School of Law, University of Strathclyde) - The Importance of Protection for Conscience in the Healthcare Environment
Respondents: Dr James Wilson (Department of Philosophy, UCL), Dr Piers Benn (Heythrop College, University of London)
2.45 – 3.15pm Tea Break
3.15 – 4.45pm Panel 4: Institutions
Dr Fiona MacCormick (Doctor in Palliative Medicine and Postgraduate Student, Newcastle University) – Ethics and End-of-Life Care: An Ethnography of End-of-Life Care on Hospital Wards
Baroness Ilora Finlay (Professor of Palliative Medicine and member of the House of Lords) - The Role of Legislation in End-of-Life Care
Respondent: Susan Watts
Closing Discussion
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