Charlotte Duffee
Postdoctoral Researcher, Harvard University
I am a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. I completed my PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Toronto. I study ideas about suffering in medicine with a focus on the following areas:
Histories of Suffering in Western Medicine and Thought
The Historiography of Suffering
The state of the art of suffering in the history of medicine and adjacent historical subfields, as well as exchanges between them.
Different methodologies for historicizing suffering.
Intellectual and Cultural Histories of Suffering in American Medicine
The intellectual and cultural history of suffering in 20th-century American medicine, with a special focus on bioethical and medico-legal theories of suffering.
Histories of Suffering in Western Thought
Using digital humanities tools and more traditional methodologies to recover concepts and moral values of suffering across different versions of the Western canon.
The intellectual history of suffering in normative ethics, with a focus on the traditions of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.
Medical Philosophies of Suffering and Their Antecedents
The Relationship Between Disciplines
The upshots historians and philosophers might reasonably expect from each other's research--and the dangers that come with attempting to reap those benefits.
How to achieve effective interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly for projects that engage slippery concepts like suffering.
Interdisciplinary collaborative tools, especially in the digital humanities.
Philosophical Implications of My Historical Research
Grounding in historical context various philosophical positions on the nature of suffering, as well as its distinctness from related experiences such as pain.
Applying the historical findings from my studies of suffering in Western thought and ethics to current disputes over the assessment (especially measurement) and treatment of suffering.
Additional 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 can be ennobling.
Definitions of moral injury, distress, and moral distress.