About this Event
The lecture will begin at 1:00pm in the Atchley-Loeb conference room.
About the Talk
A patient's voice is increasingly recognized as essential in medical care. Yet a patient's silence, especially in the face of vague symptoms and misunderstood complaints, raises critical ethical questions. This talk will examine the tension between medical narratives and patient experience through the case of Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian writer whose personal medical crisis left her unable to write for years. Her posthumous text, Il male oscuro [The dark malady], challenges the very idea of a cohesive illness narrative. By refusing to offer a clear story, Bachmann's work asks: What happens when a patient does not wish to be "read" by the medical community? Join us for a discussion on the complex ethics of narrative in clinical care and what we risk when we assume patients must share their stories.
About the Speaker
Skye Shannon Savage, MPhil, is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University's Germanic Languages program and member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, where she researches narrative and the history of medicine, especially psychiatry, in 20th century Germany. Her work has been supported by the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), and can be found in the Journal of Medical Humanities. Her dissertation, The Performativity of Diagnosis: Medicine, Fascism, and Identity in Postwar Germany, examines how narrative in clinical settings determined the interactions between shifting diagnostic categories and political discourses regarding the causes of fascism.
Please email [email protected] if you have any questions or concerns. More details about Columbia's Center for Clinical Medical Ethics can be found on our website.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
NewYork-Presbyterian / Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 622 West 168th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
