Karla F. C. Holloway

Private bodies, public texts : race, gender, and a cultural bioethics

In Private Bodies, Public Texts , Karla FC Holloway examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere. As she demonstrates, the resulting social dramas often play out on the bodies of women and African Americans. Holloway discusses the spectacle of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and the injustice of medical researchers’ use of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without her or her family’s knowledge or permission. She offers a provocative reading of the Tuskegee syphilis study and a haunting account of the ethical dilemmas that confronted physicians, patients, and families when a hospital became a space for dying rather than healing during Hurricane Katrina; even at that dire moment, race mattered. Private Bodies, Public Texts is a compelling call for a cultural bioethics that attends to the historical and social factors that render some populations more vulnerable than others in medical and legal contexts. Holloway proposes literature as a conceptual anchor for discussions of race, gender, bioethics, and the right to privacy. Literary narratives can accommodate thick description, multiple subjectivities, contradiction, and complexity.

Accidental Communities: Race, Emergency Medicine, and the Problem of PolyHeme®

This article focuses on emergency medical care in black urban populations, suggesting that the classification of a “community” within clinical trial language is problematic. The article references a cultural history of black Americans with pre-hospital emergency medical treatment as relevant to contemporary emergency medicine paradigms. Part I explores a relationship between “autonomy” and “community.” The idea of community emerges as a displacement for the ethical principle of autonomy precisely at the moment that institutionalized medicine focuses on diversity. Part II examines a clinical trial for the blood substitute PolyHeme® (Northfield Laboratories, Inc., Evanston, IL). It illustrates the ways in which bias in research paradigms and Institutional Review Board decisions attach to the notion and utility of the language of “community.” The conclusions contemporary anecdote makes apparent the vitality of the issues of prehospital emergency medical care and the ways in which decisions and practices fall too easily into a narrative of culturally biased treatment.

New Dimensions of Spirituality a Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison

Introduction Toni Morrison: A Critical Perspective The Legacy of Voice: Toni Morrisons Reclamation of Things Past The Bluest Eye Sula Song of Solomon Tar Baby Personal Reveries Conclusions

The character of the word : the texts of Zora Neale Hurston

Series Foreword Preface The Community in Her Words The Crafting of the Word: Art, Artistry and Artist--Stages of Ownership The Emergent Voice: The Word Within Its Texts The Word Assumes Its Raiment and Other Appropriate Garb The Word, Thus Adorned, Bodies Forth Itself The Spiritual Legacy in the Word Conclusion

Vulnerable populations--medicine, race, and presumptions of identity.

Asking patients about their race in a manner that suggests it will naturally reveal something about their bodies, health, or risks treats race as equal in influence to factors that affect patients across races or those that are individually determined. This makes patients racial representatives rather than individuals and can obscure more relevant contributors to health. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.