Medical humanities
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This paper examines a thread that runs through my memoir of illness: the "shock" of becoming a patient and finding that this new identity, "patienthood", conflicts with the specific, culturally defined role of mother that I idealise as "motherhood". I have taken four excerpts from my memoir and discuss them in relation to the way I constructed my intersectional and conflicting identities as mother and patient, both during the initial phase of my illness and in the act of writing about them afterwards. ⋯ Furthermore, our identities are often shaped by, and are also shaping, that ethical question: how to lead the "good life". It is all these dimensions that constitute the richness of individual "selfhood".
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In this paper, the author examines a style of teaching for a medical ethics course designed for medical students in their clinical years, a style that some believe conflicts with a commitment to analytic philosophy. The author discusses (1) why some find a conflict, (2) why there really is no conflict, and (3) the approach to medical ethics through narratives. The author will also argue that basing medical ethics on the use of narratives has problems and dangers not fully discussed in the literature.