Contact the Culutral Studies Program if you are interested in this (cultural@pitt.edu).
Medicine, Ritual, and the Contemporary Deathbed
Friday, 9 February 2007
Half-day seminar: 9.30 am- 12.30 pm (Posvar 2201:Cultural Studies/Women Studies Seminar Room)
The seminar brings together participants from three areas: 1.) Health Sciences staff and clinicians (including Center for Bioethics and Health Law); 2.) Arts and Sciences humanities scholars, and 3.) four London writers and researchers. Interested colleagues are welcome to sit in; readings provided on request.
The research seminar addresses the following questions:
* What sense do we make of the encounter between death rituals and medicine?
* How have Western cultures re-ritualized death in an age of clinical rationalism?
* In what ways, acknowledged or not, do we assign to medicine those rituals and practices have also existed in the purview of spirituality?
* What are the functions and practices of secular ritual as we encounter the inevitability of death?
* How do we seek to re-ritualize death in a secular age?
* What are the responsibilities of medicine in acknowledging and accommodating that re-ritualization?
* How does medicine chaperone "the good death"?
The starting point for the seminar is John Tercier's volume Contemporary Deathbed (London: Palgrave, 2005), which addresses the history of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. The book 's thesis addresses the centrality of this procedure in the contemporary media imaginary of death and its marginal clinical importance. Tercier contends that questions of the body and death can never be isolated questions of chemistry and biology. Our therapeutic protocols are also symbolic rituals. Dr Tercier is an emergency medicine specialist as well as a cultural historian at Lancaster University's Dept of Sociology. The larger significance of this project has to do with bringing into contact two Pitt intellectual communities that already--independently of each other--have strong international and interdisciplinary ties, but rarely come into contact with each other across the university campus. Interested colleagues are welcome to sit in on the half-day seminar and readings as available (mostly in PDF) will be send along on request.
Preparatory reading (sent by email on request):
Artiss, Kenneth L. and Arthur S. Levine. "Doctor-Patient Relation in Severe Illness: A Seminar for Oncology Fellows." _New England Journal of Medicine_. 288 (7 June 1973): 1210-1214.
Barnato, Amber E. and Derek C. Angus. "Value and Role of Intensive Care Unit Outcome Prediction Models in End-of-Life Decision Making." _Critical Care Clinics_ 20 (2004): 345-62.
Cocteau, Jean. "On death." _The Difficulty of Being_. NY: Da Capo Press, 1995/1967. Trans. Elizabeth Sprigge from _La Difficulte d'Etre_ (1957). 82-84.
Di Grazia, Christine. "Yale's Life-or-Death Course in Art Criticism." _The New York Times_ (Late ed., East Coast) 19 May 2002: C-14.
Groopman, Jerome. "Being There: Should patients' families see what happens in the emergency room?" _The New Yorker_ 3 April 2006: 34-39.
----. "The Right to a Trial: Should dying patients have access to experimental drugs?" _The New Yorker_ 18 December 2006: 40-47.
Kennedy, Randy. "Using Art to Train Doctors' Eyes." _The New York Times_ 17 April 2006: B-1.
Shostak, Stanley. _The Evolution of Death: Why We Are Living Longer_. NY: State University of New York, 2006.
Tercier, John. Contemporary Deathbed. London: Palgrave, 2005.
Wicclair, Mark R. "Informed Consent and Research Involving the Newly Dead" (abstract). _Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal_ 12.4 (2002) : 353-75.
Wicclair, Mark R. and Michael De Vita. "Oversight of Research Involving the Dead." _Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal_ 14.2 (2004): 143-64.
SCHEDULE: Friday, 9 February
9.00-9.30 Coffee, tea: Cultural Studies/Women Studies seminar room (Posvar 2201)
9.30-9.45 Arthur Levine: opening comments
9.45-10.00 John Tercier: remarks on the issues surrounding Contemporary Deathbed
10.00-10.40 Stanley Shostak (BIO), Peter Machamer (HPS): responses
10.40-11.00 Discussion, led by Dorothy Porter (University of California at San Francisco)
11.00-11.45 Lorens Holm (University of Dundee): presentation and discussion
"Architecture and the Death Drive"
11.45-12.30 Francis Gooding (Birkbeck): presentation
"They Still Believe There's Some Respect in Dying: Wittgenstein, Romero, Tercier"
12.30-2.00 Common lunch: Ali Baba
