Join us during our Winter Liberal Arts Discussion Series
A discussion led by a Special Guest, Jonathon Gleason, entitled,
No Harm
from The University of Chicago
Americans overwhelmingly say they want to die at home, surrounded by loved ones. Yet most of us will die in hospital ICUs, often after aggressive and unwanted interventions. How did we get here? No one likes to think about their death, but it is essential we do so. Not only for the sake of living a good life, but also for the sake of achieving the ever elusive "good death."
Drawing on the Catholic moral theology of Thomas Aquinas and the phenomenology of contemporary bioethicist Jeffrey Bishop, writer and University of Chicago professor Jonathan Gleason will lead us through a discussion of the controversial and instructive case of Dr. William Husel—an Emergency Room doctor accused of murdering 36 of his patients. Husel's trial exposed fundamental tensions in American death and dying: the gap between popular representations of quick, peaceful death and its medical realities, the ethical minefield of end-of-life treatments, and the catastrophic failures of communication between physicians and families.
Join us for a discussion of the trial, its philosophical underpinnings, and the challenging questions it raises about how we live and how we die. Questions for consideration will include, when does treatment become prolonging death rather than preserving life? Which authorities are enabled to make these decisions and what institutions check their power? And how do these questions expose deeper tensions between medical authority, patient autonomy, and our cultural inability to confront dying?
Jonathan Gleason is the author of Field Guide to Falling Ill, a collection of essays exploring the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape medicine. Meghan O'Rourke selected the "layered, reflective, and unusually poised debut" as the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize. Gleason's work has appeared in The Best American Essays (2024), The Sun Magazine, Literary Hub, New England Review, the Kenyon Review and many others. He is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Iowa, a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient, and a 2024 Granum Foundation Grant finalist. Currently, he teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
email info@kibbitznest.org to reserve a pot!
