Making Sense of the Unexpected: Sketches for an Ethics of Life, Empathy, and Fiction

1. Some Introductory Reflections

Although doctors spend their lives caring for and doing their best to ameliorate the lives of others, the recent developments in health care services and in the exercise of medical and nursing activities have prompted in-depth examination and elicited criticism from sectors concerned with the growing importance of an “industrial-medical complex” (Scott Graham, 2011), the number of errors (Hurwitz & Sheik, 2009), and the loss of sense of a hospitable one-to-one relationship between caregiver and patient, which so often make health care services less humane (Bleakley, 2020). While biomedical science focuses essentially on objective symptoms, mechanisms and treatments, a dialogue-based relation remains decisive to understand and find meaning in the human experiences of pain and suffering caused by illness (Evans, 2002; Coulehan, 2003; Charon, 2006; Danou, 2003, Stranghellini, 2016). A great number of physicians and scholars (Charon, 2006; Danou, 2003; Marques, 2003; Newman, 2008; Vickers, 2012; Zinn, 1993; Stein, 1985) have stressed the importance of the Medical and Health Humanities as they contribute to overcome many interpersonal difficulties in health care practice through enhancing narrative skills. These are essential to “complement and counter-balance the explanatory drive of clinical science”, which accounts for the complex in terms of the simple and “collapses experience of ill health into the quantified and quantifiable” (Hurwitz, 2011). The meaning of illness (to individuals, to families and to society) falls outside the purview of biomedical science. The personal relations between physicians and patients complement what the biomedical and technological-based paradigm only achieves partially and schematically, as “the experience and human significance of illness “are simply not science shaped”” (Ibid.).