Aging, End of Life & Narrative Ethics Reading List

This Health Humanities Portrait-- Aging, End of Life and Narrative Ethics-- uses a narrative ethics framework to explore social and systemic realities that influence care of people as they age and as they face the end of life. It highlights the patient’s voice and organizes patient values and preferences on the matter of aging and end of life. The HHP helps learners appreciate the social, systemic, economic, racial/ethnic, geographic, relational, and developmental stages of a patient’s life that influence care in older age and at the end of life. The portrait applies the virtue of narrative humility to the material so learners recognize the limits of our own knowledge and our inability to completely understand another’s experience. It employs close reading to cultivate empathic curiosity and guard against projection in interpreting a patient’s preferences, values, unmet needs, and experiences of aging and of end of life.