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October 31, 2006

Medical Humanities in the ICU

Carey Cuprisin, an ER resident (who also happens to be an attorney) has a fascinating post on the differences in end-of-life care in the ICU compared to the end-of-life care provided to his brother's cat.

Excerpt:

The medical ICU is a joyless place. It's a place where very sick people stay, usually at the end of their lives, to absorb all the high-tech medicine that we can possibly throw at them, in order to live a few more weeks than they would have otherwise.

[ . . . ]

My brother just lost his cat, Huckleberry. He was the greatest cat. Friendly, intelligent, and always hungry! He had some klnd of cancer that deformed his jaw, and he had to have it taken off. For a cat who loved to eat, that must have been a particularly large loss. My brother, because he loved this cat, did the best thing for him in the end, and had him "put down" by the vet. Huck, RIP.

If Huckleberry had been a person, he would almost surely have been laid up in the ICU for the last few weeks of his life. He'd have been unconscious, with a feeding tube down his throat to substitute for the eating he'd loved before the cancer . . .

The entire post is worth reading.  Moreover, Cuprisin cites to a poem which he finds meaningful to his practices in the ICU, which itself speaks to the significance of the medical humanities.  No?

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Comments

Thanks for alerting me to this post -- as someone who is always on the lookout for insightful poems on encounters with medicine, the poem is particularly useful. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the conference. Also, are you planning to cover the work of Arthur Frank? I'd be interested to know what you make of his taxonomy of illness narratives and the more general points made in 'The Wounded Storyteller' about the ethics and responsibilities of telling 'good' stories.

Hey Giskin,

I also found the poem quite striking.

I hope to have a post up on the conference shortly.

I hadn't planned on specifically posting on Frank before you asked, but I would be happy to do so. The most controversial aspect of Frank that has come up in my program has been his insistence on the positive duty of illness sufferers to share their stories. That sounds like something worth posting about.

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