Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics(Reflective Bioethics)

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 in Stories and Their Limits offer insightful reflections on the relationship between narratives and ethics.

Table of Contents:
Hilde Lindemann Nelson -- INTRODUCTION: How to do Things With Stories I. TELLING THE PATIENT'S STORY 1. Thomas H. Murray -- What Do We Mean by Narrative Ethics? 2. Howard Brody -- Who Gets to Tell the Story? Narrative in Postmodern Bioethics 3. Arthur W. Frank -- Enacting Illness Stories: When, What, and Why 4. John Hardwig -- Autobiography, Biography, and Narrative Ethics 5. John D. Arras -- Nice Story, But So What? Narratice and Justification in Ethics II. READING NARRATIVES OF ILLNESS 6. Rita Charon -- The Ethical Dimensions of Literature: Henry James's The Wings of the Dove 7. Charles Weijer -- Film and Narratives in Bioethics: Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru 8. Tom Tomlinson -- Perplexed about Narrative Ethics 9. Mark Kuczewski -- Bioethics' Consensus on Method: Who Could Ask fo Anything More? III. LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE CLINIC 10. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins -- Medical Ethics and the Epiphanic Dimension of Narrative 11. Tod Chambers -- What to Expect from an Ethics Case (and What It Expects from You) 12. Martha Montello -- Narrative Competence 13. Jan Marta -- Toward a Bioethics for the Twenty-First Century: A Ricoeurian Poststructuralist Narrative Hermeneutic Approach to Informed Consent IV. NARRATIVES INVOKED 14. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter -- Aphorisms, Maxims, and Old Saws: Narrative Rationality and the Negotiation of Clinical Choice 15. Rohnald A. Carson -- The Moral of the Story 16. Lois LaCivita Nixon -- Medical Humanities: Pyramids and Rhomboids in the Rationalist World of Medicine 17. James F. Childress -- Narrative(s) Versus Norm(s): A Misplaced Debate in Bioethics

About the Author :
Hilde Lindemann Nelson is Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the co-author of The Patientin the Family (Routledge 1995) and Alzeimer's: Answers toHard Questions for Families (1996) and editor of Feminismand Families (Routledge 1997). She is also the co-editor of the Reflective Bioethics series.

Review :
".a valuable collection.from distinguished philosophers who specialize in biomedical ethics." -- Ethics "This collection is very illuminating, providing a rigorous methadological look at what narrative knowledge and literary skillfulness add to medical understanding and practiceReligious Studies Review." "Stories and Their Limits should be required reading notonly for those working in the field of bioethics, but foranyone concerned with ethics in its philosophical ortheological mode." -- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University