Leuven Centre for Health Humanities Lecture ‘Law Stories’

Assisted dying – a term comprising both euthanasia and/or assisted suicide – is legal in a growing number of countries and assisted death rates are rising in wealthy jurisdictions globally. The lecture proposes that contemporary writing and visual culture engaging with assisted dying constitutes an untapped resource for disentangling the reciprocal interactions between law, medicine, and the arts that are at stake in law-making processes. By drawing on a range of multilingual examples of literary and filmic works globally, it makes the case that these engagements enable us to connect the legal, medical, and ethical macro-dimensions of assisted dying to its micro-dimensions of cultural, emotional, and personal circumstances. It will explore how the experience of assisted dying is shaped by legal frameworks and the place medicine is assigned within them, as well as questioning how cultural productions are interactively influencing laws and the role of medicine in assisted dying.