W&L’s Mudd Center Announces 2024-25 Lecture Series “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities” kicks off Sept. 19 with a keynote address by Duke University professor Adjoa Boateng Evans.

Upcoming speakers in the 2024-25 Mudd Center series (l-r): Adjoa Boateng Evans, Carl Elliott, Erica Lord

The layered and productive relationships of ethics, medicine and narrative are at the heart of the Washington and Lee University Mudd Center for Ethics’ 2024-25 series, “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities.”

The public lecture series will bring to W&L distinguished speakers from various disciplinary and professional backgrounds to shape a community discussion about the four pillars of Western medical ethics — autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice — and how our conceptions of these pillars affect how we live and die. The speakers throughout the academic year will examine a range of issues including disparities in critical care medicine, end-of-life care, and ethical dilemmas in public health. Among the questions to be considered: What does it mean to die with dignity? Why do specific diseases disproportionately affect indigenous populations in the Americas? Is there a social obligation to provide healthcare to all?

“One of the most exciting aspects of this year’s program is the way it brings together the humanities and sciences through the lens of medical ethics,” said Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center. “The Mudd Center is eager to share with the community a number of probing lectures, a panel discussion, and a multi-media exhibition to foreground ethical concerns related to the themes of medical treatment, access and research. As experiences of illness and health are integral to the human condition, we wanted our programming to offer multiple points of engagement with these complex issues.”

Learn more about this year’s theme by visiting the Mudd Center website.

The lecture series kicks off at 5 p.m. on Sept. 19 in W&L’s Stackhouse Theater with a keynote address by Adjoa Boateng Evans, assistant professor of anesthesiology at Duke University School of Medicine and faculty associate at Duke’s Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. The lecture, “In Critical Condition: A State of the Union on Compassion, Death and Purpose,” is free and open to the public.

As an anesthesiologist and critical care physician, Evans seeks to restore humanism into healthcare. She has a deep understanding of the vulnerability inherent at the end of life and uses this lens to explore the ethics around how we die. Her research interests include the intersection of faith, medicine, the arts and the disadvantaged, and she is currently investigating racial and ethnic disparities in critical care medicine and seeks to bring equitable end-of-life care to communities of color.

“As the keynote, Dr. Evans’ perspective embodies the three-pronged approach of the series: ethics, medicine and narrative,” Kerin said. “Indeed, her training in history and medicine as an undergraduate and her penetrating insights into human pain and suffering as a critical care physician and professor will set a tenor of informed inquiry and empathetic listening as we grapple with ethical dilemmas facing critical care physicians.”

Evans received her undergraduate degree in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University and returned to Yale New Haven Hospital for her residency in anesthesiology before completing a critical care fellowship at Stanford Health Care.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Global Ethics in the 21st Century, Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, The Ethics of Technology, Daily Ethics and Beneficence, and the Ethics of Design.