Anna Elsner contributed to the Leuven Centre for Health Humanities series on Trust in Medicine with a lecture entitled “Law Stories - Personal Narratives and the Legalization of Assisted Dying”.

Jordan McCullough and Marc Keller reflect on the ethical, legal, and linguistic dilemmas faced when constructing our “Living Archive of Assisted Dying.” Their considerations highlight Assisted Lab’s journey of creating a digital archive at the nexus of the multilingual, legal and digital medical humanities.

Assisted Lab’s letter is featured in The Economist as a response to its investigation ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Assisted Dying’ (13 April 2024), and the prospects for changing the law in Britain.

An online series bringing together international scholars in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to discuss disenfranchised grief in various late- and end-of-life contexts.

Volume on Literature and Medicine edited by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger in Cambridge University Press’s Critical Concept Series published.

At Gesundheitsforum St. Gallen - a public program focused on questions of health and medicine organized by University of St. Gallen’s School of Medicine - Anna Elsner gave an overview of how experiences of death and dying are mediated in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Following the duo-euthanasia of former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt and his wife Eugenie, current Prime Minister Mark Rutte romantically compared them to a literary couple from the 17th century. Wouter Schrover and Marc Keller discuss how contemporary literature and film reveal the ambivalences of joint suicides, suggesting that a simplistic, romanticising understanding is not appropriate.

Positionen zur Sterbehilfe
Wie gehen wir als Gesellschaft mit schwer kranken oder sterbenden Menschen um? Wie können wir Brücken vom Sterbenlassen zur Sterbebegleitung schlagen? Wie weit soll die Sterbehilfe gehen?
Moderation: Rolf Bossart
Gäste:
Dr. med. Erika Preisig, Sterbehelferin und Aktivistin
Dr. Matthias Ackeret, Autor und Publizist
Dr. des. Marc Keller, Literaturwissenschaftler

At a medical humanities conference at FU Berlin entitled ‘Mental Health erzählen in Literatur und Medizin. Aushandlungen von psychischer Gesundheit und Krankheit aus intersektionaler Perspektive’, Marc Keller gives a paper on the question of what role grief, depression and existential suffering play in the suicide of older people who lose their spouse.

In a special issue of the journal ‘Literature and Medicine’ entitled ‘Cultures of Palliative Care’, Marc Keller analysis three texts from contemporary German- and French-speaking literature that address the existential suffering of older people who are losing or have lost their ill partner and therefore wish to die.

The study examines the role of the ‘Liebestod’ motif in contemporary German, Swiss and French narratives on assisted dying. It shows that most works are ambivalent: While they present existential suffering as a legitimate reason for assisted dying when older people don’t want to outlive each other, they also problematise certain aspects such as an overly idealised notion of self-determination.

The edited volume ‘Juristendichtung. Ferdinand von Schirachs Werk zwischen Literatur und Recht’ contains various studies on the work of the German writer Ferdinand von Schirach. Marc Keller has contributed an article in which he examines the portrayal of assisted suicide debates in the theatre play and film ‘Gott’.

Marc Keller and Anna Elsner have contributed a book review of Emmanuèle Bernheim’s ‘Tout s’est bien passé’ to the edited volume ‘Ethik des assistierten Suizids: Autonomien, Vulnerabilitäten, Ambivalenzen’ that looks at the ethical, legal and social challenges of assisted suicide in the three German-speaking countries of Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

A recent push to legalize assisted dying in France obscures more fundamental problems that plague end-of-life care.

Cet évènement, qui réunit Assisted Lab, des praticiens des soins palliatifs de la Maison Gardanne, et divers artistes à la Fondation Camargo vise à réfléchir à ‘L’Art du Soin’. Autrement dit, comment l’assistance, les soins, et l’art sont-ils conçus dans les processus différents de l’assistance médicale à mourir et des soins palliatifs.

Preisverleihung des Marie Heim-Vögtlin-Preises 2022 in St. Gallen - mit Gewinnerin Anna Elsner, Ben Jann, Matthias Egger und Verena E. Müller, die Biografin von Marie Heim-Vögtlin.

Interview with Anna Elsner as a French citizens’ council of 150 members of the public will meet Friday to begin discussions on end-of-life care, including whether assisted suicide should be legalised. As French laws have evolved over the last two decades, calls have increased to allow medically assisted deaths for terminally ill patients.

Anna Elsner studies how literature addresses and shapes the role of dying in society. Her innovative work has earned her the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize for 2022.

397 early-career researchers won European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants, including Anna Elsner for the project Assisted Dying in European Writing and Visual Culture: Reciprocal Interactions between Law, Medicine and the Arts since 2000