We take a moment to honor the memory of two profound contributors to the bioethics community, the late Dr Henry Kilham and Professor Miles Little. Their significant impacts on the ethical and medical landscapes, particularly in Australia, have shaped the ways we navigate difficult conversations. We also mark that is has been a year since Courtney's death.
In light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, we consider the immense burdens borne by medical professionals in these conflict zones. With the Australian government's refusal to support a ceasefire, we discuss the implications this has on the ground. Here, the concept of 'grievable bodies' and 'grievable lives' comes to the fore. Stay tuned for our next episode on infertility, releasing later this week.
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
We take a moment to honor the memory of two profound contributors to the bioethics community, the late Dr Henry Kilham and Professor Miles Little. Their significant impacts on the ethical and medical landscapes, particularly in Australia, have shaped the ways we navigate difficult conversations. We also mark that is has been a year since Courtney's death.
In light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, we consider the immense burdens borne by medical professionals in these conflict zones. With the Australian government's refusal to support a ceasefire, we discuss the implications this has on the ground. Here, the concept of 'grievable bodies' and 'grievable lives' comes to the fore. Stay tuned for our next episode on infertility, releasing later this week.
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
Okay, so welcome to. I don't know what we're going to call this. We can't keep on having little sub-genres. Okay, I guess we can do whatever we want Fire side chats Fire side chats. What are we going to do?
Speaker 2:Maybe we could build a fire, sing a couple of songs. Why don't we try that? Oh, a campfire. Well, isn't that all snug and comfy? Fire no good.
Speaker 1:You know, I think part of the joy of doing this podcast is having interviews with people and talking about their interesting work, but there's also other things we want to talk about that also feels perhaps intrusive to bring into the context of other people's work. So, for example, talking starting off talking about the Israel Gaza conflict when we're interviewing somebody or talking with somebody about their own research just puts perhaps their work or their things in a context that maybe they don't really want to have associated with their work, not associated in a bad way.
Speaker 2:But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, for instance I guess something that we do want to talk about as well the way that, in the past month or so, a couple of important people within the bioethics communities that we're part of have died. You know, thinking of Henry Killam and Professor Miles Little, who was the founder of the Centre for Values, Ethics and Law in Medicine, where we both did our PhDs. I know that I unfortunately wasn't able to attend any of the memorial events for Miles that were held in Sydney, but, Jane, you there I have.
Speaker 2:I've been to two. One was a. One was a really lovely gathering of, I guess, ex-vallumers who all I suppose remembered a particular side of Miles or had a particular shared experience of of Miles's sort of personal and professional and academic input, and the other was on Friday, the Miles Little lecture, which was really excellent. We heard from Professor Marie Toomes talking about mental health and suicide prevention in Indigenous communities. Really, really a terrific warning actually. So, yes, both Miles and Henry will be hugely missed and they both made really important contributions to the field.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was fortunate enough to interview both of them for my.
Speaker 1:History of Biotics project, henry Killam, who people some people may be less familiar with.
Speaker 1:He was, you know, really instrumental in developing sort of pediatric pediatrics ethics and was also involved in the NHNMRC's National Health and Medical Research Council development of ethics and resource allocation in health care.
Speaker 1:So Henry was maybe not as prominent as Miles in the ethics community but certainly has shaped the ethical conversations and the sort of, I guess, ethical infrastructures of Australia around that, and he in the interview as well. Just in the years of him practicing medicine and being a student, I guess in the I'm probably going to get these dates wrong, but you know in the 1950s, 1960s, just the way things had changed a lot in relation to, I guess, the professionalization of ethics, and had an interest in conversation with him about how in that period doctors did certain things with no guidance and that had some flexibilities and advantages to it In a sense that there were some times when they would practice things like euthanasia without sort of explicit laws or regulations around that, but that they were often in positions and he talked about an early experience of caring for and looking after someone with severe burns that you know was he.
Speaker 1:you know was still quite moved by that and just how hopeless and horrendous the situation was and how lacking in any kind of guidance as to sort of.
Speaker 1:Medicaid sort of end of life options and yeah, so Henry and Miles were always around vellum and always conversation was something that both of them greatly enjoyed. There's a special issue of the journal bio thick inquiry that is talking about miles little's legacy prior to his death. That was published and he was able to read that and that's good. I have a piece in that, but there are many others that we will link to in some way. Yeah, I don't know. Did you have anything further you wanted to say about?
Speaker 2:No, I was, I was trying to think of it. I suppose I really appreciated their willingness and openness to chat to people who didn't really know what they were doing. Both very generous generous people who were really interested in talking about ideas and giving people the space to try things out, which isn't always easy to come by, and it shows, I think, a real, a sort of generosity of spirit that is sometimes missing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess the other thing that I've been wanting to mention is, you know, in the lead up to this is coming up to the year anniversary since the death of Courtney and you know, I think at the time I had mentioned that we would do some kind of episode or thing on suicide and grief.
Speaker 1:At this stage I don't haven't felt sort of in a place to do that, I guess, but I think grief is something that I've been thinking a lot more about, both in this context but also in teaching the philosophy of love, sex and death to first year students. I think grief was missing in the module on death and I think that's an interesting area where some philosophers are starting to write about grief. Judith Butler had already been writing about grief in terms of grieve ability and what bodies and what whose lives are grievable is quite explicable, relevant now in the context of the current wars, but also, I think, in an episode that we're going to that we've already recorded but we'll be coming out on Friday. Talking about grief in relation to infertility and child loss is another. Our own miscarriage is another interesting component of grief that is often lived in silence. So some things that we may try to tackle in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when the time is right. If there is ever a right time. You did just do a really gentle but lovely segue into the Middle East, Chris.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, I mean, we're not a current affairs show, as most people would know, but it's hard to ignore some things that are going on, and I think in particular when there is not only the humanitarian crisis that come with wars and conflicts, but also the effect on medical communities and medical and the delivery of medicine in that context. So you know, obviously the attacks by Hamas on the 7th of October on the Israeli communities were horrendous and awful and the cost of life there, you know, unspeakable. But the medical community and the medical infrastructure was there to treat wounded, whereas what's coming out of happening in Gaza in relation to medical infrastructure and medical communities is that not only are they having to treat and care for a huge number of wounded and those wounds, some of which are horrific in terms of burnings and limbs lost, and these sorts of terrible, terrible situations.
Speaker 1:But the medical infrastructure is increasingly deteriorating and there are less and less trained medical staff and personnel, who themselves are also victims of this conflict in losing family members but needing to work in the same time as that's going on.
Speaker 2:And it seems like ever diminishing physical space for them to be able to provide care as well. So it's coming from all directions, really, that minimisation of being able to provide medical care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know, neither of us are expert in this area and we're not here to tell people things that they don't. Perhaps can't already know in relation to you know what's being reported by the media, but some things that are being under reported I think worth sort of drawing attention to. So some people may have heard of Gassan Abu-Sitar, who's a British Palestinian surgeon. He has been working in Gaza well between Britain and Gaza, I think since the late 1980s.
Speaker 1:He was there as a medical student in 1987, during the conflict that was happening then, and has been going back ever since to, I guess, particularly. You know, I think he's a reconstructive surgeon, so he's there right now and there's an interview that I have shared via Twitter. But just an excerpt from that, I think, just gives an account of the conditions that he and others are working for. So the interviewer asked him what is the status of the medical staff in terms of the exhaustion, of working long hours and under such harsh conditions, how much of the medical staff are local and how much of it belong to international organisations or aid groups and charities, and he responds people are just not physically exhausted. We have been doing 16 hours a day since the war started, if not more. They are emotionally exhausted the scenes that they see. But also we've lost so many members of staff. We've had 40 doctors killed, 18 nurses and a lot of my colleagues have lost family. Almost all of them have had to move their families from their homes. Three of them lost their homes when the buildings that they live in were targeted. People are just completely spent. There are no foreign staff. There is medicine science frontier. I'm with MSF. There's MSF local staff still left One of the doctors who was killed, dr Medhat, saddam or Satan.
Speaker 1:He's a plastic surgeon and a colleague in this department. I'd worked with him in 2009, war and in 2014, and he was a lovely, lovely man. He was working that day and his sister evacuated and came here. He just took her to his house where he thought she'd be safe and that's when the house was hit. Before that, I was doing surgery on the remaining child of an obstetrician at Schiffer hospital who was killed with her other daughter. Her husband is in Jordan on work. So the situation clearly is very grim and impossible for seemingly impossible for these medical staff working there, and I think, as people who are interested in the ethics and politics and history of healthcare, we can't ignore what's going on, but also it's hard to know quite what else to do. I mean, I think it would be great to see health organisations giving their voice to ceasefires.
Speaker 1:I don't know what something like the Australian Medical Association has said, but they're historically quite a conservative organisation, so I wouldn't be expecting too much from them. But UNICEF and Medicine Saint-François-Tierre, obviously and others have been calling for ceasefires.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's fairly satrisome that if the Australian government can't support a ceasefire, then the AMA is unlikely to do so. So how would you respond to somebody who doesn't have any sympathy, I suppose, or doesn't see a way to morally support Palestinian people right now?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know if there's really much of a way to respond to somebody who, I think, if you can't see the humanity of others and empathise with their suffering and see the injustice, of their suffering, then I don't think there's any kind of argument that's going to convince people of that.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, some people would say that they're not, there isn't an injustice going on, or that it's. Maybe they'd say there's collateral damage, to use that. I don't know if that's a euphemism, it's such a disgusting description. So, yeah, I think that there would be not a lot that can be said, which I think comes back to what I mentioned in relation to Judith Butler and grievable bodies and grievable lives. Can we grieve for the lives of people who we may see as wholly other to us, but some people may? So, yeah, I think that, in response to those sorts of positions, it's difficult really to cut through because, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I get it.
Speaker 2:I don't want to be like, oh, this is too hard, but it's really hard. It's hard to talk about, it's hard to. It's interesting in its sort of reflexivity. I find myself personally thinking about what I want to say in terms of the imagined position that the person I'm talking to has, and that's a really weird one. I guess it was interesting to me when I lived in Singapore from 2018, 2019,.
Speaker 2:Our neighbours were Israeli and their kids had all been born overseas and their expats were working for international companies. But their oldest kids were about to graduate from high school, and so they had decided to move the family back to Israel so that the kids could do their military service. But the kids had never lived in Israel, and I was sort of confused by that. She said well, they can't be Israeli if they don't do their military service. It doesn't make any sense at all that they need it's the most important thing for them to do, which is, for somebody who hasn't grown up with any of those sorts of commitments just is an impossible thing to imagine.
Speaker 2:But I asked her a whole lot of questions about the Middle East conflict because it's something that I've never understood, because everybody has always said, oh, it's too hard, it's too complicated, it's too. You know X and I've never engaged with it. And she said a whole lot of things that I, frankly, still don't really understand, but the conviction with which she said them has just made everything, if possible, more confusing. And if yeah, so this is going absolutely nowhere, this comment from me, except for that it's hard and it's I don't live it and yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think, the conviction, like what you were saying about the conviction, I think it's a good way of putting it. I mean ideology is another, but some people feel I'd say that in a sort of neutral sense. I'm not saying ideology in a you know a pejorative way.
Speaker 1:but I think, people, that for some people it does come down to these underlying commitments and beliefs that are not changed by persuasive argument or statistics. And for me I think it's. I feel that there's a similarity with, say, gun control in the US or the state of that debate, and it's also, I find, unpredictable as well. In, like, when I was living in the US, some people who I would think you know would be all for, you know sensible gun restrictions, you make some comment and then, before you know it, you've sort of keep the hornets nest, so to speak, because there are those deeply held beliefs and commitments.
Speaker 1:And there is a difference to it, but yeah, yeah, that's not to say that people can't be changed. I mean, for me, I try to listen to the voices of people who have experienced, on both sides, the violence and being part of the, say, the Israeli mechanisms of war. So there's a, there's a group on Instagram I mean the, beyond the call breaking the silence which are former Israeli Defense Force, some of them volunteer or not volunteers. Some of them the low level recruits, like what you were, the ones who have done military service, but right up to higher, higher people who have served in the Israeli Defense Force and have been, you know, they're breaking the silence in that they're talking about the things that they have seen and done and the rationales for it. I think those voices, or the voices of the doctors and health professionals on both sides as well, the you know, many Israeli human rights lawyers who are advocating for the upholding of human rights for Palestinians as well, so to to listen to. But yeah, I think there are long held.
Speaker 1:So I guess someone who is I mean this is a bit tangential, but I do think gets to that conversation that you were referring to earlier about religion, there's a guy called Gary Burge who, whose work I have found particularly formative in my own thinking about this.
Speaker 1:He's a Christian theologian from the US, from Wheaton College, who talks about his own experience of you know the US, particularly US Christians, have a long standing love and commitment to Israel for a variety of theologically misguided reasons, and he talks about his experiences of his thoughts shaping and shifting in the context of working in Israel and in Palestine. And he wrote a book Whose Land, whose Promise? What Christians Haven't Been Told About Israel, palestine. But he, in an interview, in a different podcast, a different one to ours, he talked about his experience of living and working with Palestinians and Israelis and how both of them are shaped and formed by a deep fear and that for both of them that fear has is not imaginary. You know they have both experienced, you know, horrific crimes against them and so they are both fearing a repetition of those in different ways. And and he sort of suggests that until that fear can be overcome, that any kind of lasting piece of solution is is not likely.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think for people who are not Israeli or Jewish or Palestinian, I think it's important, I guess, to acknowledge that fear and again, in a in a not in a in a cool sense like that there is and there have been things to be feared.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I don't think, you know, we're obviously not going to have any kind of profound insights that you can't hear or read elsewhere, but I do think you know, we do appreciate what we have in the context of this podcast and the conversations that we have with people around it, both obviously in in the podcast when we interview people, but more than that, when we talk with people either via email or in person. I think that silences we're not going to talk about everything, but there are some things that we do need to talk about, and I think the with what's going on with particularly medical and healthcare workers and the calls from medical and health organizations around what's happening in Israel and Gaza is something that we want to be able to do, and I think that we wanted to mention, as well as remembering, the lives of Henry Miles and a year since Courtney's passing or death, I should say she always wanted the D words yeah, but yes, later this week, a new episode will be dropping on infotainment. Thank you,