- Location
- Medical Sciences Building, 1 King's College Circle, Room 2173
- Series/Type
- JCB Event
- Dates
- April 25, 2019 from 4:10pm to 5:30pm
Links
University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics presents the 19th Annual Alloway Lecture
“Disorders of Consciousness and Disability Rights: Why the Sciences and Humanities must Converse”
Speaker:
Joseph J. Fins, MD, MACP, FRCP, The E. William Davis, Jr., MD Professor of Medical Ethics, Chief, Division of Medical Ethics & Professor of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, Director of Medical Ethics & Attending Physician, New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center, Co-Director, Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury (CASBI), Weill Cornell and Rockefeller University, Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Medicine, Bioethics and the Law, Yale Law School
Medicine’s evolving understanding of severe brain injury has raised a host of normative and legal questions about our obligations to this historically marginalized and vulnerable population. In this lecture, Joseph J. Fins, will review our current state of knowledge about the vegetative and minimally conscious states, the role of neuroimaging in the assessment of these conditions, and emerging drugs, neuroprosthetics, and therapeutics to treatment these liminal states of consciousness. He will consider the ethical and legal questions posed by misdiagnosis, covert consciousness, and the segregation of these patients in chronic care far from the medical mainstream. He will suggest that the needs of these individuals can better met by viewing them through the prism of disability and civil rights. Throughout his lecture, Professor Fins will suggest that insights from both the sciences and humanities will be necessary to address complex scientific and social problems posed by patients with disorders of consciousness.
This lecture is free and open to the public. No registration is required. It will also be webcast.