Tod S . Chambers

Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Faculty Member

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Tod Chambers is an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. His areas of research include the rhetoric of bioethics and cross-cultural issues in clinical medicine. He is the author of the books, The Fiction of Bioethics (Routledge) and Redescribing Bioethics (Rowman & Littlefield-Lexington). He also co-edited with Carl Elliott Prozac as a Way of Life (University of North Carolina Press).

His original area of study was storytelling as a ritual activity and he conducted research in Thailand from 1988-1989 and in 1990 on the ritualization of the sacred biography of the Buddha. When he finished his dissertation work in 1992, he began teaching ethics and medical humanities at Northwestern University's medical school. Since 1996 he has taught the Clinical Ethics introductory course for first year medical students. In 2009 he received the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence; in 2018 he received the Michael M. Ravitch Teaching Award; in 2024 he received the George H. Joost Teaching Award. For the academic year of 2003-2004, he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2006, he became director of graduate studies in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. From 2009-2016 he was director of Northwestern's Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. He has served on the editorial boards of the journals Literature and Medicine, Second Opinion, Journal of Medical Humanities, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and the American Journal of Bioethics. In 2000-2001, he was co-chair of the annual meeting for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), in 2003 was elected to the board of ASBH, and in 2007 served as ASBH's president. In 2010 he was elected as a fellow at the Hastings Center.
Phone: 3125030412
Address: 750 N. Lake Shore Dr., #624
Chicago, IL 60611

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Laurie Zoloth

University of Chicago

Jonathan Beever

University of Central Florida

Lawrence Gostin

Georgetown University

Kenneth Kipnis

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Eniel Alonso

Richard Zaner

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Mark Sheldon

Northwestern University

Harry - Berger Jr

University of California, Santa Cruz

Jonathan Gould

Elizabeth Ann Danto

Hunter College

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Papers by Tod S . Chambers

From the Ethicist's Point of View: The Literary Nature of Ethical Inquiry

Hastings Center Report, 1996

From the Ethicist's Point of View The Litera y Nature of Ethical Inqui y by Tod Chambers Contra t... more From the Ethicist's Point of View The Litera y Nature of Ethical Inqui y by Tod Chambers Contra those bioethicists who think that their cases are based on "real" events and thus not motivated by any particular ethical theory, Chambers explores how case narratives are constructed and thus the extent to which they are driven by particular theories. /w(hy do those of us who write about bioethics often feel it is necessary to reassure I I our readers that the cases which are presented are 'real" or "actual'? Tom Beauchamp and b u rence M~C~llough, in the preface to ~E~: l ? w M d R e q m & & m of Physiuuns, state that each of the cases they discuss "is based on actual events."' ~n GZSB in ~iaethicr, carol Levine and Robert Veatch note in their introduction that all the cases presented "are based on real events.& And in the acknowledgments to Mortal ChoiGPs, Ruth Maddin mentions that "all material is taken firom actual cases. These declarations of authenticity, I suspect, merely reflect a general distrust in the bioethia discipline of the "hypothetical" or "fictional" case. If there is any strongly held article of faith within the discipline, it is that bioethickts deal with the Aristotelian messy "real world" and that. .. .

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The Medium Is the Moral Message

From the ethicist's point of view

Hastings Center Report, Dec 22, 2015

Stories as Data

Opening and Closing the Case

Comment: Toward Thick Reading

Journal of Clinical Ethics, Jun 1, 2001

Enhancing reflection

PubMed, Oct 18, 2005

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (review)

Literature and Medicine, 1999

ABSTRACT Literature and Medicine 18.2 (1999) 256-261 In 1994, the annual meeting of the Society f... more ABSTRACT Literature and Medicine 18.2 (1999) 256-261 In 1994, the annual meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values was held in Pittsburgh. This is often referred to as the &quot;mega-meeting,&quot; for it was held jointly with the Society for Bioethics Consultation and the American Association of Bioethics. Because there were no physical altercations between the members of the three groups, the meeting eventually resulted in the formation of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. At one point during that weekend I was persuaded to play hooky and go visit the Andy Warhol museum, which had recently opened. I must confess that my primary motivation was more to be relieved of endless encounters with tweed jackets than any particular interest in an artist I thought of as simply a practitioner of pop art. After touring the museum, I was impressed with the range and depth of Warhol&#39;s insight into issues of contemporary culture and representation, but I made no association between his art and the presentations I had attended during the conference. However, after reading David Morris&#39;s book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, I have come to suspect that the conference should have taken place in that museum. Morris begins his analysis of illness in our time with a detailed examination of Warhol&#39;s life and work. Morris observes how Warhol presented himself as part of a &quot;heroin-chic&quot; lifestyle yet, paradoxically, rarely actually engaged in the life his image portrayed. While appearing unwell, Warhol led a relatively healthy life, and it is this odd contrast between representation and reality that makes Warhol such an apt figure with which to begin an examination of the particular postmodern condition of contemporary illness. Morris argues that Warhol&#39;s mysterious death following complications from a routine surgical removal of his gallbladder was also a profoundly postmodern way to die -- in a high tech environment and due to an iatrogenic illness. Warhol&#39;s medical biography parallels his artistic work in the way it typifies our postmodern age. He rejected the modernist aesthetic in favor of one that dissolved the distinction between high and low culture and explored the consumerism of the art world. Because of this, Morris argues, Warhol&#39;s work reflects &quot;the emergence of a new, postmodern, postindustrial consumer-culture economy in which no aspect of life would be left untouched by the power of images, including the life of the body&quot; (p. 29). Morris is quite aware of the dangers of explicitly employing an infamous term like postmodern, but he believes it to be &quot;useful in identifying the relatively coherent period in the development of Westernized industrial nations that begins, roughly, at the end of World War II&quot; (p. 7). Thus, Morris uses the term postmodernism simply to designate a particular shift in the zeitgeist of Western civilization, and by using it in this way, he escapes having to provide an all-encompassing and confining definition. Postmodern illness, according to Morris, entails a radical shift in the modernist concept of sickness as a purely biological entity that can be separated from culture and subjectivity. It is necessary -- as Morris does -- to distinguish his concept of postmodern illness from George Engel&#39;s biopsychosocial model. For all its renowned revolutionary critique of the biomedical model that continues to dominate Western allopathic medicine, in actual practice Engel&#39;s concept has been used as if these (bio-psycho-social) were separate domains of human experience. Morris wishes instead to inject Engel&#39;s initial insight with &quot;two decades of postmodern thinking&quot; (p. 73) and states his thesis bluntly: &quot;Postmodern illness is fundamentally biocultural -- always biological and always cultural -- situated at the crossroads of biology and culture&quot; (p. 71). The term biocultural emphasizes the inseparability of biology and culture and thereby problematizes the distinction -- which has become a critical aspect of the rhetoric of the medical humanities -- between disease (the biological) and illness (the patient&#39;s experience). Morris&#39;s style of analysis, like that of the New...

Metaphors as Equipment for Living

American Journal of Bioethics, Sep 21, 2016

The cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas once said that a good way to begin an inquiry into a par... more

Participation as Commodity, Participation as Gift

American Journal of Bioethics, Feb 1, 2001

In her conclusion to Money for Research Participation: Does It Jeopardize Informed Consent? Chr... more

The virtue of attacking the bioethicist

The angels and devils of representing prozac

Book Review: Marleen S. Barr, (Ed.), Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium. Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. 214 pp. Paper: $22.95 (US), 0819566527; Cloth: $65.00 (US), 0819566519

Transcultural Psychiatry, Mar 1, 2009

In this anthology, Marleen Barr has brought together an unusual collection of writings, all of wh... more In this anthology, Marleen Barr has brought together an unusual collection of writings, all of which focus on our relationship to some imagined future. The contributors include some well-known authors and scholars in science fiction, such Harlan Ellison, Walter Mosley, Marge Piercy, Neil Postman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Eric Rabkin. While all of the essays look at the future through the lens of science fiction, Barr has selected writings from a wide range of genres: fiction, literary and cultural criticism, satire, memoir. This genre mixing – or what Barr refers to as ‘genre fission’ – represents a self-conscious effort to depict our postmodern world where such categories as truth and fiction have seemingly become entwined. There is particular warrant in this approach, for, as Brian McHale has noted, just as the detective novel embodies the modernist worldview, science fiction embodies postmodernism (McHale, 1987). Barr groups the writings into four categories: ‘Future Past,’ ‘Future Present,’ ‘Future Perfect,’ and ‘Future Critical.’ The first section concerns ‘the relationship between past events and future scenarios.’ Postman’s essay, ‘Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century,’ presents a challenging example of this theme; he submits that in order to see into the future we must look backward to the past. The next selection, the short story ‘The End-of-the-World Ball’ by James Gunn, depicts the gathering of a group of catastrophe experts awaiting the start of the new millennium. While the story is intriguing, it is unclear how it connects to Barr’s theme of the past. The second part, ‘Future Present,’ is said by Barr to also be about the past, and it is difficult to see how the theme of the first section (‘the relationship between past events and future scenarios’) differs significantly from the stated theme of the second (‘the reciprocity between the past and the future’). In this part, Darko Suvin reads Yevgeny Zamyatin’s classic antiutopian novel, We, in relation to the contemporary world. George Zebrowski’s ‘The Coming of Christ the Joker’ retells Dostoyevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ as if it were occurring today on Larry King Live, and finally, Ellison in ‘Goodbye to All That’ portrays a search for a utopia, which the hero discovers is saturated with capitalism. The third section of this anthology, ‘Future Perfect,’ assembles writings which examine the future through the perspective of feminism. Barr’s own contribution to this part describes the arrival of a cloned Betty Friedan, who is a superhero or rather a superfeminist. Pamela Sargent’s story, ‘Utmost Bones,’ offers a future without bodies. Piercy’s essay in this section strives to imagine sex a thousand years from now, which she admits ‘is a silly and futile endeavor’ but also an ‘absorbing’ one. The final essay of part three is Rosi Braidotti’s scholarly examination of the presence of female monsters in science fiction. The final section of the anthology, ‘Future Critical,’ looks to the future of the genre of science fiction. Patrick Parrinder examines how science fiction can date itself both figuratively and literally. Rabkin argues that science fiction will become an increasingly central component of our lives in the future. Robinson provides perhaps the most postmodern of essays, a fictional review of a history book that Transcultural Psychiatry 46(1)

The Fiction of Bioethics

Routledge eBooks, Dec 22, 2015

Tod Chambers suggests that literary theory is a crucial component in the complete understanding o... more

Reflecting on the Pathography

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2020

ABSTRACT:This essay looks at the liminal genre of the critical pathography, a literary form that ... more ABSTRACT:This essay looks at the liminal genre of the critical pathography, a literary form that bridges the boundary between an academic analysis and an illness narrative. It argues that when this genre is compared to more traditional forms of analysis in the medical humanities and bioethics, the critical pathography treats its subject in a manner that is more akin to what Gabriel Marcel refers to as a mystery, something that can only be explored, than to a problem, a puzzle that can be solved.

Demythologizing Bioethics: The American Monomyth in Clinical Ethics Consultations

American Journal of Bioethics, May 31, 2018

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Root Metaphor and Bioethics

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2016

While a substantial amount of work has been done on the metaphors used in bioethics (such as the ... more While a substantial amount of work has been done on the metaphors used in bioethics (such as the body as "property" or the ethics consultant as "engineer"), this essay focuses on the manner in which metaphors reside at the core of various bioethics theories. Drawing upon Stephen Pepper's (1942) notion that philosophical positions are expressions of specific "root metaphors" (similarity, machine, organism, act), the essay will look at the way theories such as principlism, rule-based ethics, casuistry, and phenomenological ethics are also grounded in particular root metaphors. These root metaphors express fundamentally different notions of the way the world operates, and thus arguments over the superiority of particular moral theories are actually disagreements over worldviews and cannot be resolved through rational discourse. To agree with an alternative theory would entail the adoption of a fundamentally different root metaphor for understanding the way the world works. It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions.-Richard Rorty (2009) B ioethics has been particularly attentive to the role of metaphors in the discourse on moral issues in medicine. In The Physician's Covenant (2000), William May discusses how the various metaphors of the physician (fighter, tech

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