Speakers address concept of suffering at conference
Bioethics — the study behind ethical controversies in the medical field — needs to study art in order to better understand suffering, a professor said Wednesday night.
“The Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine” is a three-day conference hosted by the UI and the Carver College of Medicine. The conference started Wednesday at 7 p.m. with a presentation from three professors — Music, Art, and the Ethics of Suffering.
The presentation examined the role of suffering in art and highlighted the difficulty in defining and addressing it in the field of medicine.
Raymond De Vries, an associate professor of the Bioethics Program in the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine, spoke first, addressing issues he has faced in the field and how it deals with suffering.
He began with the history of bioethics and its inception, trying to deal with the largest questions of existence — the origin and meaning of life.
He said bioethics “thinned” out, replacing life’s big questions with patient procedures.
“Suffering creates a community,” De Vries said. “Suffering makes us resist material culture and instead focus on relationships.”
Tim Lowly, an artist and professor at North Park University in Chicago spoke next, discussing the relationship between suffering and his art.
“I don’t think of my work as depicting suffering,” he said while speaking about his work that deals with his daughter, whom he refers to as “profoundly disabled.”
His daughter, he says, is unable to see, speak, breathe, or stand up on her own and is also prone to frequent seizures.
“She seems at peace with life in a way that I cannot imagine seeing peace with life,” said Lowly. “I want people to see her as she is which is essentially human.”
John Rapson, a UI associate professor of music and the director of jazz studies, talked next about the blues and its unique relationship with suffering.
“Blues artists don’t actually spend any time thinking about a cure [for suffering],” Rapson said, adding, “They are not trying to cure the blues as much as they are articulating the blues.”
The conference continues today at 12:30 p.m. with its featured presentation, “Holding power: Between Pen and Scalpel,” and Friday at 3:15 p.m. with the closing presentation, “Healing or Not, Here We Come.”
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