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Empathetics, Inc.

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Friday, October 14, 2016
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Jane Thrailkill

What can we learn from the dark humor that is sometimes generated by routinized empathy in health care settings?

Just as titles like "The Limits of Empathy" and "After Empathy" are populating humanities conferences, academic medicine is embracing empathy as essential to clinical competence. Yet efforts to put empathy to use in healthcare has in turn produced a sub-genre of clinical humor that pokes fun at the instrumentalization of feeling. This paper takes the tension between empathy and what Henri Bergson called "the comic spirit" as the occasion to explore how dark humor, which uses incongruity to point up social and structural absurdities, might serve as a productive mode of cognition and critique. The difficult question, from a health humanities perspective, is whether the "comic frame" (to use Kenneth Burke's term) merely produces a site for illumination - and possibly subversion - of medical-bureaucratic norms or also provides space for essential conversations about burnout, patient care, clinical competence, and compassion.

Jane F. Thrailkill is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Contact: Sarah Rogers