Fiction of Bioethics

Tod Chamber is Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at Northwestern University Medical School.

"In The Fiction of Bioethics, Tod Chambers provides a much-needed model for a more relexive bioethics. Applying the instrument of rhetorical analysis to a careful reading of some classic ethics cases, he reveals the literary methods philosophers regularly use to persuade both authors and audience. . .[his work] is an important contribution to what can now become a continuing rigorous criticism of bioethics' most privileged communications. With Chambers' help, something is beginning to happen to the way we think about cases." --Martha Montello, Univ. of Kansas School of Medicine for Literature and Medicine 19, no. 2 (Fall 2000).""Tod Chambers' readings of medical narratives offer a fresh and refreshing vision of illness and healing. He shows how our reconstructions of the cases, in whatever form, ultimately transforms the way we see them. After reading his analyses and learning to see as he sees, things will never look quite the same again." -- John Lantos, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of Chicago Hospitals"When Chambers debunks 'the myth that there are any clear unmediated presentations of moral problems' and urges bioethicists to 'acknowledge that their selection of relevant facts is itself guided by their philosophical perspectives', he is surely right - and no one to my knowledge has ever made that case more effectively." -- -David Barnard, Medical Humanities Review

• 1: Stories as Data; 2: From the Ethicist's Point of View; 3: Distancing Oneself from the Case; 4: The Chronotope of the Case; 5: Opening and Closing the Case; 6: Why Bioethics Lacks Character; 7: Speaking for the Patient; 8: Dax Redacted; 9: The Medium is the Moral Message; 10: Sexing the Case; Concluding Remarks: Taking Stories Seriously