Stories and Their Limits

by Nelson,Hilde Lindemann

• ISBN13: 9780415919098
• ISBN10: 0415919096
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-10-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Narratives have always played a prominent role in both bioethics and medicine; the fields have attracted much storytelling, ranging from great literature to humbler stories of sickness and personal histories. And all bioethicists work with cases--from court cases that shape policy matters to case studies that chronicle sickness. But how useful are these various narratives for sorting out moral matters? What kind of ethical work can stories do--and what are the limits to this work? The new essays inStories and Their Limitsoffer insightful reflections on the relationship between narratives and ethics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: How to Do Things with Stories	vii
Hilde Lindemann Nelson
I. Telling the Patient's Story	3	(88)
1. What Do We Mean by "Narrative Ethics?"	3	(15)
Thomas H. Murray
2. Who Gets to Tell the Story? Narrative in Postmodern Bioethics	18	(13)
Howard Brody
3. Enacting Illness Stories: When, What, and Why	31	(19)
Arthur W. Frank
4. Autobiography, Biography, and Narrative Ethics	50	(15)
John Hardwig
5. Nice Story, But So What? Narrative and Justification in Ethics	65	(26)
John D. Arras
II. Reading Narratives of Illness	91	(62)
6. The Ethical Dimensions of Literature: Henry James's The Wings of the Dove	91	(22)
Rita Charon
7. Film and Narrative in Bioethics: Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru	113	(10)
Charles Weijer
8. Perplexed about Narrative Ethics	123	(11)
Tom Tomlinson
9. Bioethics' Consensus on Method: Who Could Ask for Anything More?	134	(19)
Mark Kuczewski
III. Literary Criticism in the Clinic	153	(62)
10. Medical Ethics and the Epiphanic Dimension of Narrative	153	(18)
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins
11. What to Expect from an Ethics Case (and What It Expects from You)	171	(14)
Tod Chambers
12. Narrative Competence	185	(13)
Martha Montello
13. Toward a Bioethics for the Twenty-First Century: A Ricoeurian Poststructuralist Narrative Hermeneutic Approach to Informed Consent	198	(17)
Jan Marta
IV. Narratives Invoked	215	(58)
14. Aphorisms, Maxims, and Old Saws: Narrative Rationality and the Negotiation of Clinical Choice	215	(17)
Kathryn Montgomery Hunter
15. The Moral of the Story	232	(6)
Ronald A. Carson
16. Medical Humanities: Pyramids and Rhomboids in the Rationalist World of Medicine	238	(14)
Lois LaCivita Nixon
17. Narrative(s) Versus Norm(s): A Misplaced Debate in Bioethics	252	(21)
James F. Childress
Contributors	273	(4)
Index	277