Charlotte Duffee

My historical research charts the emergence of a contemporary medical discourse about suffering, which most scholars say started in America during the early 1980s. My work focuses on the dominant theory in this discourse, proposed by a physician-philosopher hailing from New York named Eric Cassell. I investigate some of the cultural trends that encouraged his theory to spring up with great success when it did, focusing specifically on ideas about suffering trafficked between medicine and law.

My philosophical work explores how my historical findings might affect the way researchers in medicine understand suffering today. Here, I am mainly interested in two questions. First, I examine whether a fundamentally legal point of departure is appropriate for a philosophical analysis of suffering. My answer at this point seems to be ‘no.’ From this answer, my second question asks how we should then theorize about suffering. To this question, I offer a few ways of parameterizing suffering and plan to also sketch a new theory of suffering in medical contexts.

Apart from my historical research, I have other philosophical interests in suffering, including the following: distinctions between pain and suffering; discrepancies between pain science and bioethical theories of suffering; the satisfactoriness of these theories; and whether suffering from disease and injury can be noble.