CHARLOTTE DUFFEE

I am a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. My work explores the social and cultural factors at play when moral problems become objects of medical theory, assessment, and treatment. I focus specifically on the medical construction of tragedy as a window into broader cultural sensibilities about human values: what it means to be human, what our purpose is, what makes for a good life (especially when times are bad), and the like. I explore why the historical actors who medicalized tragedy asked the questions that they did, and why they accepted some answers over others. I then work to fill the philosophical gaps my historical explanations expose in contemporary ethical and empirical scholarship. So far, I have focused on the following themes:

Histories of Suffering in Western Medicine and Thought

The Historiography of Suffering

- The state of the art of suffering in the history of medicine.
- Methodologies for historicizing suffering.

Intellectual and Cultural Histories of Tragic Medical Experiences

- The intellectual and cultural history of suffering in 20th-century American medicine.
- The intellectual history of moral injury.

Broader Histories of Suffering in Western Thought

- Using digital humanities tools to recover concepts and moral values of suffering across different versions of the Western canon.
- The intellectual history of suffering, and of ennobling responses to it, in moral philosophy.

Medical Philosophies of Suffering & Other Tragic Experiences

Philosophical Implications of Historical Research on Suffering

Grounding in historical context various philosophies of suffering.
Relating the history of suffering to current disputes over the assessment (especially measurement) and treatment of suffering and of conditions in which suffering figures.

Additional Conceptual Work:

The following philosophical aspects of suffering: distinctions between pain and suffering; discrepancies between pain science and bioethical/medical theories of suffering; the satisfactoriness of these theories; and whether suffering from disease or injury is always evil.
Definitions of moral injury, distress, and moral distress.