Blog: Melting in Montparnasse

This blog is being written in a sweltering Paris whilst waiting for the delayed Eurostar to whisk me home from the fourth Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Teachers held at its customary Columbia campus site in the city. Perhaps my self-conscious alliteration above comes from the topic of using poetry in teaching bioethics which was the subject of my presentation this year. The conference confirmed (OK – I’ll cease now) my impression obtained from the web that there is very little academic literature on this topic at all. Thus I was not surprised when a bioethicist from Spain mentioned to me that the call for papers by Cambridge University Press (CUP) to write on this topic had gone unanswered from January this year so would I be willing….? Well you can guess the rest. I was much struck at this year’s gathering by several features. Firstly the continuing illustration of the vast differences in the extent of bioethics education, even just across Europe, with the discipline still in a relatively early stage in, for example Romania and even parts of Spain, but with highly encouraging signs of development in both these countries. Even nations such as the Netherlands where each medical school has a biomedical ethics teaching programme at undergraduates and postgraduate level, never the less national interchange and coordination between centres is only just beginning. The large contingent of delegates from the US however seemed very inter-connected in spite of there being so many bioethics centres in the States. No wonder they seemed to have made considerable progress since last year in plans to certificate and accredit US bioethics programmes nationally, though there still remain practical issues such as who certificates and accredits the first tranche when neither status has previously existed for anyone? As last year, the main highlights of the conference for me were the ‘test drives’ of innovative teaching methods from other institutions. I had never experienced a ‘reader’s theatre’ presentation before for example. Three teachers read a prepared script based on the short story Brute by the surgeon-author Richard Selzer in which an intoxicated patient is stitched to the trolley through his ear lobes by an angry casualty surgeon to force him to lie still to have laceration sutured. It made quite an impact and I am going to employ the “readers’ theatre” technique in future classes at St Mary’s. There was also a very engaging film from a team from Groningen entitled Integrity Project which will become freely available on the web very soon and is a very helpful aid for teaching research students about the importance of integrity and honesty in research protocols. The film shows they can be breached in ways that that are not obvious but alas are far from uncommon. It was also illuminating to see the same dilemmas occur all over the world with both atrocities and thoughtlessness bringing medicine into disrepute, the infamous Tuskegee experiments in the US being replicated in US foreign policy more recently in Guatemala or the UK Alder Hey scandal having smaller scaled re-run in Boston are just two examples. If only in an internet-connected world when we learn of such mistakes or maleficence in other countries we stopped thinking “Well you might expect it there” to asking instead “Are safeguards in place in my own institution to prevent that happening here!” Dr Trevor Stammers, Programme Director for Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.