Mr Pat McConville1
1Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University
Heart failure is a leading cause of morbidity. It is incurable and can only be managed or palliated. Later stages of the illness prevent patients from undertaking normal activities, limit their possibilities and transform their experiences. These sorts of changes can be considered within phenomenology of illness.
Artificial hearts supplement or supplant the failing heart to alleviate symptoms and mitigate limitations. But physician and philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem describes medical interventions as physiological innovations. This claim could be extended to recognise that they are also phenomenological innovations.
In this presentation, I consider some of the ways artificial hearts change patients’ understanding of and relationship to their world.
First, I consider the extent to which artificial hearts can help patients bring about new normalities or engage with the world in a way appropriate to and achievable in their current condition. I argue that artificial hearts can sustain a fantasy of cure and prevent both patients and clinicians from understanding what is possible in their current condition. At the same time, artificial hearts introduce their own new limitations and transformations.
Second, I consider artificial hearts through the framework of hermeneutic human-machine relations. New ways of understanding and interpreting one’s own body are generated by the representations of visceral body states produced by artificial hearts. These compulsory interpretations trouble and disrupt patients’ perceptions of felt states of being and worldly possibilities, and may hold patients newly responsible for monitoring felt and represented cardiac states.
Biography:
Pat McConville is a doctoral candidate in philosophical bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre. His main research is focused on phenomenology and artificial hearts. He has also published on other topics in phenomenology, including medical devices, congenital illness and reverse triage; and bioethics, including therapeutic misconception.