Medical Humanities and Anesthesiology

Maybe it was the ducks. Escorted by a man in a red, black, and gold braid suit, plump mallards waddled from the elevator to the lobby fountain at The Peabody in Memphis, Tennessee. I had just returned from a walk to see the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, blocks away at the Lorraine Hotel, and had been profoundly moved looking up at the balcony where he had been shot. I was a child of the 1960s, when assassinations of important American leaders roiled the nation. Here I was, on my way to the next session of a conference for the Society for Health and Human Values (SHHV) in 1992, and decided, while staring at the duck parade, to pursue medical humanities as my scholarly work. It was a far cry from my training in the pharmacology of anesthetics, and, since no program, course, or recognition of the field...