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Anne Hudson Jones Professor & Kempner Chair in the Humanities in Medicine - University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston United States Bioethics - Medical ethics

• 03.07.2014-30.07.2014
  

  Narratives of Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Ethics in Medical Catastrophes

  The primary objective of my stay at the Brocher Foundation is to refocus my research into events at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina on the many narrative accounts that have emerged in the intervening years. These narratives range widely in purpose and perspective, from early newspaper articles, feature series, and oral histories to published autobiographical accounts, media interviews, fictionalized television episodes, forensic reports, court records, investigative reporters’ accounts, articles in medical, bioethics, and law journals, as well as autobiographical presentations for professional medical groups and at bioethics symposia, and a highly detailed book of narrative journalism. My intent is to provide a comparative analysis of these diverse accounts, alongside narratives from other hospitals and health-care facilities in New Orleans after Katrina, in an effort to array as fully as possible the complexity of ethical decision making in the midst of such catastrophic conditions. Close scrutiny of highly contested narratives can help highlight important issues of narrative ethics and ethics of narratives, as well as ethics in medical catastrophes—especially questions of abandonment, triage, and euthanasia. The significance of this work extends far beyond New Orleans and the events at Memorial Medical Center to medical catastrophes across the globe, whether from natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or pandemic diseases.

Anne Hudson Jones, Ph.D. in comparative literature, is Professor and Harris L. Kempner Chair in the Humanities in Medicine, in the Institute for the Medical Humanities (IMH) and the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health of The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, where she is also on the faculty of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She served for eight years as Director of the IMH Medical Humanities Graduate Program, which offers the only Ph.D. in medical humanities in the United States.
A founding editor of the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins U Press), Jones served as its editor-in-chief for more than a decade. She has published widely in American and international humanities and biomedical journals, including a series of essays about literature and medicine for the Lancet. She has two books: Images of Nurses: Perspectives from History, Art, and Literature (U Pennsylvania Press, 1988; Japanese trans., 1997); and, with Faith McLellan, Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication (Johns Hopkins U Press, 2000).
Her current research interests include the theory and practice of literature and medicine; narrative ethics; narratives of mental illness; Renaissance art, anatomy, and humanism; and ethical issues in narratives of medical catastrophes. She has received many awards for her research and teaching, most recently the University of Texas Board of Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award (2013).

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