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Short abstract

Offering provisional notes towards a clinical ethics forged in productive tension with anthropology, this paper draws on experiences to consider moral injury and burnout, suggesting that a grounded, embodied ethical praxis can shape more fulfilling and sustainable modes of care.

Long abstract

Spurred in part by the COVID-19 pandemic’s uncovering of cracks in the foundation of the American healthcare system, growing attention is being paid to burnout in the health professions. Whether framed as a failure of personal resilience addressed by personal wellness initiatives or a structural problem characterized by intolerable rates of moral injury, limits in the capacity for healthcare workers to endure the conditions of their labor are increasingly recognized as a crisis threatening the fabric of the medical community. Drawing on my experience as an anthropologist and current resident physician-in-training, I note that one dimension of this crisis stems from the absence of frameworks that adequately contextualize the quotidian ethical quandaries that characterize clinical life. This experimental paper suggests a deeper ethical engagement, one which leans into the entanglement and culpability of the clinician. I work towards a conceptualization of clinical ethics that expands the frameworks of bioethics towards novel tools for considering the ethical in practice. Rather than propose a simple cure for burnout or a salve for moral injury, I conceptualize how both biomedical and anthropological engagements with ethics might be productively and mutually transformed to forge a path toward more sustainable care.