Caring for caring

Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 13:30 in Psychology & Sociology

In 1943, Austrian-born essayist Jean Améry, working for the French resistance, was captured by the Gestapo. He wrote later of the experience in “At the Mind’s Limits,” remarking that torture was — simply — “the absolute absence of caring.” Caring — for others, for ourselves, even for things and places — is at the core of our humanity. But how to cope with its demands in a medical setting was the subject of a two-panel conference this week (Dec. 6) in the Barker Center’s Thompson Room, sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. The event capped three days of events entwining the humanities with the law (Dec. 3 and 4) and with medicine (Dec. 6). Caring requires “a peculiar courage” and marks the very essence of “what really matters” to human beings, said Mahindra Humanities Center Director Homi Bhabha. (Bhabha is also the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of Humanities in the Department...

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