They graduated from Maryville College more than 40 years apart, but a mutual career calling will bring Dr. Brian Childs ’69 and Caroline Anglim ’13 back to campus in March to take part in the annual Cummings Conversations.
Childs, a professor of bioethics and professionalism and chair of the Department of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia, will be joined by Anglim, who will receive her doctorate in religious ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School in June and join Mercer as an assistant professor of bioethics and professionalism in July.
The theme for this year’s Cummings Conversations is “Neighborly Love: Reimagining Social Responsibility in Medical Ethics.”
“Medical ethics needs to live in the tension between the one and the 99, to borrow a parable from the Bible,” Childs said. “I’ll talk about my own clinical experience with the (Covid-19) pandemic, and the realization I had as we were working on allocation policies for resources – things like ventilators, treatments, even oxygen – that we had overlooked something that was terribly important, because all of our allocation algorithms ignored underserved populations.”
Individual concern vs. community responsibility is a complex issue, Anglim added, and health care debates often focus on the care of patients rather than the needs of certain populations and communities.
The pair will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, March 28, in the Lambert Recital Hall of the Clayton Center for the Arts on, “Who Is My Neighbor?” At 1 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, they’ll talk on “Neighbor Love in Crisis” in the Lawson Auditorium of Fayerweather Hall.
Both talks are free and open to the community. Please note that masks are required in all campus buildings.
Steve Wildsmith is social media specialist at Maryville College.