CONSTRUCTION AND PRACTICE OF MEDICAL RESPONSIBILITY: DILEMMAS AND NARRATIVES FROM GERIATRICS

• Published in: Culture, medicine and psychiatry Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 1 - 26
• Main Author: KAUFMAN, SHARON R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Springer Nature B.V 01.03.1997
• Subjects: Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Anthropological methodology; Bioethics; California; Clinical medicine; Codes of Conduct; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Ethics; Ethics, Medical; Female; Geriatrics; Health; Humans; Life Support Care; Male; Medical anthropology; Medicine; Mental Competency; Morality; Morals; Narratives; North Carolina; Occupational therapy; Older people; Patient Care Team; Patients; Phenomenology; Physician's Role; Physicians; Physicians - psychology; Primary care; Professional Ethics; Reasoning; Right to Die; Social Responsibility; Urban Areas; Verbal communication; North Carolina; United States > US; Empirical Approach; Bioethics and Professional Ethics
• ISSN: 0165-005X; 1573-076X
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1005345716123

A narrative approach is employed in this article about dilemmas and physician reasoning in geriatric medicine in order to explore the moral-medical worlds of urban American physicians. Reconstructed dilemmas, in the form of stories told by 51 doctors, are analyzed as cultural documents of both clinical-moral knowledge and practice and the physician as moral actor. Discussion focuses on ways in which responsibility is constituted and enacted through a particular language of clinical action. This analysis opens the subject of bioethics to a range of infrequently discussed issues that physicians cite as deeply troubling and contributes to a broadening of anthropological approaches useful in the study of bioethics.