Abstract

Clinical ethics aims to provide practical approaches identifying, analyzing and solving moral problems in clinical settings. Educators of clinical ethics commonly do case studies as a useful educational method. Some authors have recently advocated a specific and unique way of case study, which regards a clinical ethics case as a literary story that should be interpreted by making full use of literary imagination. Based on this standpoint, we explore what kinds of attitudes learners should build through clinical ethics case study course. It seems helpful to refer to the method of psychotherapeutic interview at the first contact, core characteristics of which are placing importance on individuality and creating a hypothetical interpretation of the aspects of the patient. These two hold true of working of the clinical ethics case study. Clinical ethics case studies involve drawing a hypothetical image of the case by interpreting the characters of all the people involved and the circumstances in the case. Thus from an analogy between the way of psychotherapeutic interview and perusing cases in clinical ethics case study, we realize that learners of clinical ethics should attempt to throw imaginative light on and depict the case by focusing on the life history of characters in the case and by detecting what they do not understood yet in the given case, without eliminating their own subjective impressions. Through such touch working learners, at the same time, must effort to look deep inside and objectify themselves