The 2010 Quandaries in Health Care Conference (hosted by the University of Colorado as Aspen's Center for Bioethics and Humanities) is titled "A Need to Confess?: Writing About the Healthcare Experience,” and it seems like it may very well be of interest to TLA folk. It happens Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2010 in Aspen, so if you aren't going to be able to join us in VT, perhaps you can make it out there.
Quandaries in Health Care is a conference series in which keynote discussants, guest faculty and conference participants gather at the Given Institute in Aspen, Colorado, for two and one-half days of large and small group discussions on emergent and perennial issues in biomedical ethics and health humanities.
The theme of the 2010 conference, "A Need to Confess?:Writing About the Healthcare Experience,” explores the literary trend among healthcare professionals to reveal the pressures faced and felt by them, such as the expectations to be perfect, to enact compassion, and to demonstrate respect for patients—even the most difficult ones. These narratives, many of them autobiographical in form and confessional in tone, often detail breaches in those expectations as well as the shame, guilt and anxiety that such breaches evoke.
Additional information can be found here.
Complicity between doctor and patient . . .
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Uno desaparecido—
after the visit to Kaiser
Did you forget the privilege of your position?
Did you forget that each life is precious—
yours and mine—even when we have
just a few minutes together—
especially when we have
just a few minutes together—
what if you died in the night or I
and that was our moment together to use
and we let it fall prey, as we did,
to some extraordinary rendition of our own,
allowed our moment to become uno desaparecido
to become a bloody Myranmar monk—
lost to each of us, gone, never to return.
What if I were your very own new born child,
vernix caseosa on your hands and forearms
as you catch and cradle this new life?
Think of me so and I will try to do the same
and not wait to see what you will do
but do what comes most naturally to newborns—
know my need to be seen and held—
and know, as well, your own
and then, perhaps, if we can hold ourselves there
we’ll seize our one moment
and not allow it
to be disappeared.
BD 11/14/07