The Quest for Health: Contemporary Debates on Harm, Medicine, and Ethics

The course explores issues in medicine and global health with a focus on ethics. We address both ethics in the context of clinical decision-making and also the social, cultural, and economic "ethical field" of health care. Ever-expanding technological possibilities re-shape our social lives, extending them, giving greater control but taking it away. Treatments such as living donor organ transplantation, stem cell therapies, and physician-assisted suicide transform our understandings of life, death and what we expect from one another. Technologies such as glucometers bring new inequalities.