These are Assisted Deaths: Between Law, Ethics, and Aesthetics

Speakers: Anna M Elsner, PhD and Vanessa Rampton, PhD, University of St Gallen, Switzerland

Tea and Cake, 4-6 in the President's Library

This talk delves into how stories of assisted dying—told through film, memoir, and other cultural forms—shape not only public understanding but also assisted dying law-making. These stories are never neutral: their form, medium, as well as cultural and legal context determine what can be known and felt about suffering, care, and medicine's place at the end of life. By tracing how such narratives move between aesthetics, ethics, and law, the talk exposes their power to humanize, persuade, and unsettle—and to transform contemporary debates on dying.

Anna Magdalena Elsner is associate professor of French Studies and Medical Humanities at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her work examines death and mourning in contemporary literature, philosophy, and film, fostering transdisciplinary perspectives on medicine and end-of-life care. She holds a BA from Oxford University and a PhD from Cambridge University, and has held positions or fellowships at King's College London, UTMB, Yale, the Hastings Center, the University of Zurich, and the Camargo Foundation. She is the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (2017) and co-editor of The Proustian Mind (2022) and Literature and Medicine (2024). She is the principal investigator of Assisted Lab, a European Research Council project on the aesthetics, laws, and ethics of assisted dying.

Vanessa Rampton is a senior researcher within Assisted Lab at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and an affiliate member of the Department of Equity, Ethics, and Politics at McGill University in Montreal. She has degrees in intellectual history from University of Geneva and University College London, a PhD from King's College, University of Cambridge, and has held positions or fellowships at University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, and McGill University. She is the author of Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (2025).