Notes in the Margin - 4 April 2025
Notes from a Family Meeting is a newsletter where I hope to join the curious conversations that hang about the intersections of health and the human condition. Poems and medical journals alike will join us in our explorations. If you want to come along with me, subscribe and every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Every so often, I’ll share things I’ve been reading with a few words of mine scribbled in the margins. If you have something to share, please do! The comment section is open.
Assisted Dying in Canada: What Everyone May Not Know But Should
Scott Kim provides a helpful overview of the Canadian law regarding assisted suicide and euthanasia (ASE), arguing that it seems in practice what is a practice framed to ameliorate suffering actually exists to serve autonomy alone since patients get to determine what treatments they accept and define their suffering. This makes the practice vulnerable to expansion and abuse.
Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)
Michael Levin wants us to acknowledge that while our metaphors are inadequate for describing both biological creatures and machines, they can nevertheless be useful. However, it will involve letting go of the belief that “wet biochemistry” can be the only substrate for consciousness and intelligence. Ironically, even though his criticism of the religious would suggest only biological creatures can be ensouled, I don’t think there’s nothing necessary about that. C.S. Lewis gestures toward this in That Hideous Strength and there’s nothing at least in the Christian faith tradition that would exclude the possibility that an immaterial form could come to inhabit a non-biological substrate (e.g., a demon co-opting a computer). It may even explain some of the double-edgedness of our technology.
GeriPal: Hastening Death by Stopping Eating and Drinking
I was invited back to GeriPal along with Thaddeus Pope and Hope Wechkin to discuss this controversial topic. Readers of my newsletter will be familiar with my stance. Despite our disagreements, the conversation was collegial and I hope others find it helpful.
The Waters of Lethe Flow From Our Digital Streams
reflects on what Greek mythology might teach us about the digitally induced forgetfulness so many of us experience as we doomschool. I would say the lesson translates well into the world of medicine, as our fascination with technology (and the reductionism that so often accompanies it for the sake of efficiency) makes us forgetful of the body. Rather than doing something new, perhaps we need to simply remember. Not that there was a golden age of medicine (there wasn’t), but that when we’re forgetful of human embodiment, in all its messiness and inefficiency, we forget all the ways to properly care.A Call for Parentalism in Medicine
reaches for a new term to describe not an imposition of a clinician’s values on an unwitting patient nor a blind deference to their choice, but a collaboration between the expert and the one in need in service to the patient’s health and goals. Although Cifu rules this out, I’ve called this maternalism (following after Laura Sullivan). Whatever you call it, it seems like the right way to practice medicine.From the Archives
Here's something, only a little dusty, that new readers may not have seen.
Patients are people, which means they cannot be atomized and isolated from the web of relationships they inhabit and call family. Yes, some people don’t have families, but their tragic isolation is the exception that proves the rule: people need their families.
