ABSTRACT

Biomedical ethics and the medical humanities are fields of study and practice with both conventional and competing approaches. In this chapter, I bracket and critically appraise conventional approaches to biomedical ethics and the medical humanities. I then consider more radical accounts and look for commonalities between two of those more radical approaches. Commonly accepted understandings of biomedical ethics and the medical humanities could be seen as sedimented—‘settled’ as usual understandings. To extend the metaphor, further up the cliff face is a second stratum comprising more unusual crystallisations of ethics and the humanities, some of which are still under study and have yet to gain wide acceptance. Of those more radical accounts, I am particularly interested in representations of biomedical ethics and the medical humanities as aesthetic practices.