In 2006 Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis created a new position -- 'hospital ethicist'. I began developing this position February 2007. The primary purpose for the position is to make possible an expansion of the hospital's ethics program from being reactive and fragmentary to being proactive and comprehensive as a resource within the hospital. The journey that has taken me to this experience has been quite circuitous. The common threads -- the search for ‘a very healthy center’ . . . the attempt to ‘see from below’ . . . the resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’.
I am 56 years old. My wife and I have three daughters.
I was raised in a small Western Kentucky town in a lower-middle class, community-service oriented, religiously conservative family of which I was the first to graduate from college. I focused seriously on becoming a professional baseball player until my numerous football-related injuries undermined my ability to train. Having been scouted by the Cardinals and the Reds allows me still to enjoy thinking about this childhood dream/fantasy!
My undergraduate studies began with a regional junior college and continued with a regional state university where I concentrated on history, communications, and sociology. After completing a seminary program in religious studies, my doctoral studies tracked the history of some of the more central ideas -- theological, philosophical, political, and scientific -- that have shaped modern western societies. I concentrated on the time periods around the 4th-century fall of Rome, the 12th-century rise of universities, the 18th-century shift toward a scientifically-oriented society, and the World War II era. I continue to find through this discipline of study advantageous resources for understanding the ways we assign meaning in our lives, especially when faced with acute or chronic conditions that threaten our sense of security and hope. I have had occasion to test many of these ideas in such settings as: (1) a spouse at my first wife’s side during her fourteen-year battle with multiple sclerosis (d. 1987); (2) a graduate professor with seminars for such subjects as human suffering, ethics, history of religious thought, classics in spirituality literature, philosophy of religion (1979-91); (3) a researcher into end-of-life decision-making (including physician-assisted dying issues), involving clinical research projects and annual research trips to Holland (1992-2004) to better understand the Dutch experience with euthanasia; (4) a social historian, writing life-narratives for/about 125 cocaine-abusing women living in poverty-burdened sections of Miami who had delivered cocaine-exposed babies.
My first opportunities to collaborate with medical faculty on projects pertaining to the integration of ethics with medical education and residency training came about in the early 1980s at the University of Tennessee Memphis School of Medicine with a young physician who had recently joined the Ob/Gyn Department after completing his commitment to the Navy, and with a pioneering pediatrician who founded in 1968 and continued to direct until 2004 the UT Memphis Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Since then it has been my privilege to have formal affiliations with the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Miami, Louisiana State University, and East Tennessee State University. Since 1991 I have had an adjunct appointment with Michigan State’s Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences.
Since 1992 I have had three ‘on the field’ or ‘inside’ experiences within the health care sphere (these very educational experiences have overlapped each other somewhat):
- For four years, I worked closely with a neonatologist with the University of Miami who was the principal investigator for two projects involving in combination 300+ cocaine-abusing mothers who had delivered cocaine-exposed babies. These women and their children lived in two of the most poverty-stricken and violent sections of Miami. My responsibilities included guiding the evaluation process, (re)interpreting the vision and hypotheses, refreshing the overly-stressed social workers on the staff, and framing policy issues as well as writing the mothers’ life-narratives.
- For five years, I worked within an Ob/Gyn Department with responsibilities for ethics education, residency coordination, and faculty development -- e.g., (1) coordinating the department’s three-site residency program, (2) implementing changes designed to bring the residency program into compliance with accreditation guidelines, (3) designing an ethics and jurisprudence curriculum, (4) facilitating research projects -- including but not limited to ethics projects -- within the department.
- For the ten years previous to coming to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, I was a member of the executive leadership team for an East Tennessee non-profit community health center that exists to deliver comprehensive primary care (including all the obstetrics in the area) to the disadvantaged and un(der)served families in three rural poverty-burdened Appalachia Mountain counties.
Photography -
Photography has been for many years my most important spiritual exercise. I enjoy photography because the experience can quicken the ability to see, refresh sensitivities, raise awareness. The years my family and I lived in Vermont deepened my appreciation for the natural, the simple, the true. I like to think some of my images evoke this appreciation. The years we lived in New Orleans taught me the worth of lagniappe, the unanticipated ‘little extra’ that makes an already satisfying experience special. I like to think some of my images give this gratuity.