Center for Clinical Bioethics

Lucia Galvagni, PhD

Section: Visiting Scholar Program

Lucia Galvagni is a philosopher, she comes from Trento (Italy) where she does research in bioethics. She is a visiting scholar for the months of June-August 2010 at the Center for Clinical Bioethics.
Her main interests are clinical ethics, the ethical questions of genetics, and narrative medicine and ethics. She published Percorsi di etica clinica (2003), Bioetica e comitati etici (2005), and articles on other topics in bioethics. She teaches Bioethics to Biotechnology students, in Trento and Pavia. Next Fall she will work to open a “laboratory of ethics and philosophy of medicine” at the Healthcare Organization of the Province of Trento.

Narratives and metaphors of illness and care

Narratives in medicine allow us to understand the moral visions of the people involved in the clinical encounter. Through them we can also collect many different ideas about some fundamental concepts of medicine, such as health and illness, pain and suffering, and the role of therapy and care.
It is often through a narrative that the patient’s attitude towards an illness can emerge, giving voice to his/her particular way of living and perceiving this condition. In this narrative process some main images and metaphors emerge: they express the way each person represents her/his own lived experience and life history. Also caregivers and healthcare organizations offer some main narratives that describe their moral position and their view on a specific situation or towards the therapeutic intervention itself. The starting hypothesis is that these stories operate at two main levels: existential and interpersonal, on the one hand, communitarian and institutional on the other.
The research will concentrate on collecting some of these stories and on identifying the moral components present in them: that will allow to determine what moral visions, sense of values, or compliance with norms are present in a specific healthcare context.