title: Bearing response-ability: theater, ethics and medical education.
abstract: This paper addresses a growing concern within the medical humanities community regarding the perceived need for a more empathically-focused medical curricula, and advocates for the use of creative pedagogical forms as a means to attend to issues of suffering and relationality. Drawing from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I critique the notion of empathy on the basis that it erases difference and disregards otherness. Rather, I propose that the concept of empathy may be usefully replaced with that of ethical responsibility, which suggests a shared sense of humanity outside the boundaries of presumed knowledge of the other. To illustrate this argument, I theorize the importance of theater within medical education. Theater, I argue, may engender ethical responsibility in the Levinasian sense, and thus may allow learners to differently engage with the experience of the suffering other. As such, I examine Margaret Edson's widely used play Wit as a platform for such an ethical encounter to occur. Thus, rather than working to understand the value of theater in medical education in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition, I theorize that its primacy within medical curricula arises from its ethical/relational potential, or potential to engender new forms of inter-human relationality.
authors: Health Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford Campus, Brantford, Ontario, Canada. krossiter@wlu.ca
authors: Kate
authors: K
authors: Rossiter
mesh_terms: D003479:Curriculum; D004324:Drama; D004501:Education, Medical; D004645:Empathy; D004992:Ethics, Medical / Q000193:education*; D006809:Humanities / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D009864:Ontario; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D012941:Social Responsibility