Dying, Death and the Humanities. Resurrecting the Meaning of Dying and Death in Healthcare.

Dying, Death and the Humanities.

Resurrecting the Meaning of Dying and Death in Healthcare.

Thursday 28 November 2024, 2pm - 5pm

St Luke's Chapel

Speaker: Christina Lamb, PhD (Athabasca University and University of Toronto)

More details about program and additional speakers to follow.

Death has become a medicalized event. At the same time, the meaning of dying and death is relatively absent in mainstream healthcare and to some extent, palliative care contexts. Instead, death is becoming instrumentalized as a healthcare intervention. Subsequently, the meaning of the life events of dying and death are not humanely captured in mainstream and contemporary ethics approaches that need to take into consideration the unique and integrated perspective of healthcare as a personal and moral endeavour. Rather, healthcare has become a professional enterprise where death is operationalized as a preference. Instead, death is life’s final event and whether it transpires in the context of illness or not, the meaning of death requires preparatory contemplation of what it means to die, and to die well. In this paper, I will examine how death is currently perceived in mainstream healthcare, palliative care and bioethics contexts. Then, I will consider how death is valued through the lens of personalist philosophy to show how death can be re-appreciated as a life event. Drawing on the concepts of interpersonal relationality and interdependency, I will show how they complement an integrated and personal account of death to revalue death as a life event for healthcare and bioethics today.

Biography:

Christina Lamb is a bioethicist with an MA in Bioethics (St. Mary’s University, UK), and a doctorate in Philosophy of Nursing (Health Science) from the University of Western Ontario (Canada). Dr. Lamb was a Fellow in Science-Engaged Theology in the New Visions in Theological Anthropology project in the School of Divinity, University of St. Andrews (Scotland). As a bioethicist, Dr. Lamb has interdisciplinary expertise in health science, empirical research, philosophy and theology. Clinically, Dr. Lamb is also a Registered Nurse with expertise in pediatric oncology acute care, clinical bioethics and global health nursing/ bioethics. Dr. Lamb is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Disciplines, Athabasca University (Canada). Dr. Lamb directs a program of research on conscience in the ‘Alethia Conscience Project’. She is also establishing a national program of research on end-of-life ethics for children as a New Investigator with the Sick Kids Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health. Dr. Lamb is the author of ‘Conscience: The integrating aspect of being a moral person’ (in progress).

For further information please contact Alberto Giubilini, alberto.giubilini@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Organised by TORCH Medical Humanities Research Hub and Uehiro Oxford Institute.