Humanities and Bioethics

“To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.”

                                                                                                                                                                       “At the Same Time” Susan Sontag

In an age of scientific positivism and pragmatism, the humanities seem increasingly redundant, the poor cousins of more lucrative academic disciplines such as medicine, research and business, fields that have utility and that promise earning power. In educational institutions worldwide, economic constraints immediately lead to axing humanities courses, or at best, drastically reducing their scope – primarily because they are viewed as disciplines that are non-essential, peripheral. This view of the humanities discounts their importance as a constantly evolving archive of human thought and experience. In November 2009, I was a student in the Master in Bioethics program at the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC). A screening and discussion of the movie “Wit” (2001), based on Margaret Edson’s eponymous play that explores human mortality, sickness and medicine proved to be a powerful introduction to the ways in which bioethics can be taught.

The humanities have a distinctive importance in CBEC’s academic programs, interwoven into the entire academic cycle in ways that are both explicit and implicit – in dedicated sessions, and through the (sometimes spontaneous) integration of varied literary and visual media into other courses. As one of the faculty who led many humanities sessions at CBEC, I find this merging of the arts, ethics, and scientific advancements which give rise to ethical conundrums, both effective and compelling.

Through introduction to the humanities, students enrolled in CBEC academic programs are “obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention” to the moral and historical subtexts of varied media. Religion and philosophy encourage them to reflect on their own moral references. By reading literature, they begin to recognize the predicaments of others, their pain, their dilemmas. Through the exercise of imagination and observation, they learn to decode the moral, cultural and historical elements of a painting, and understand how a photograph capturing an instant in time can be a detailed moral commentary on an epoch.

Stories, poetry and images provoke not only rational analysis but also emotional and moral responses and although emotions are routinely vilified in ethical discourse, I believe moral reflection to be an amalgam of rationality, emotion, and perhaps, intuition. Students have discussed excerpts from Susan Sontag’s book, “Regarding the Pain of Others” and viewed iconic photographs, such as “Napalm Girl” (1972) which has become a defining image of the Vietnam War. The discussion focused on images as powerful tools of reportage and the blurred line between viewing and voyeurism. I remember a student remarking that she had seen so many images of suffering that they had become meaningless. Deconstructing images of war, paying “certain kinds of attention,” made her focus again on the humanity and pain of those portrayed in the photographs.

In one session, students viewed the painting, “The Last Burning Train” (2009) by Pakistani artist, Jimmy Engineer, which depicts a large assembly of migrants resting in the shade of an old tree on the way to Pakistan in 1947, following the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Students commented on the historical backdrop and studied the attitudes, faces and postures of different characters portrayed in the painting. One student interestingly remarked that the most important character depicted was the tree itself, because it stood witness not only to the carnage that took place in 1947 but to a longer period of human history spanning many generations.

In other humanities sessions, students discussed literature, such as physician and author, Richard Selzer’s short stories, including “Whither Thou Goest,” in which the wife of a deceased organ donor seeks the man who has received her husband’s heart. Reading Selzer’s stories allowed students to interpret the actions and underlying moral compulsions of his characters and come to conclusions that they had not initially anticipated.

In Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting “The Ambassadors,” a white blob in the foreground is revealed to be a skull when viewed from a certain angle, a reminder of death. The humanities allow us to look at issues in this layered, complex way in which we discover depths we had not first suspected. Disciplines such as philosophy, religion, literature and the arts cannot be scientifically validated, but within them, it is possible to occasionally find something that cannot be grown in cutting-edge laboratories – the kernels of wisdom and compassion.