The Ohio State University Department of History and the Medical Heritage Center present...

John C. Burnham Lecture in the History of Medicine/Science

Speaker: Johanna Schoen, Ph.D., Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick with an affiliation at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research.

"Life and Death in the Nursery: The Establishment of Neonatal Intensive Care Units and Debates in Bioethics"

Johanna Schoen offered a brief history of establishing the country’s first NICUs in the 1960s and discussed the emergence of parent/patient activism in neonatology as parents began to question aggressive NICU treatment. Bioethical debates about when to treat severely ill infants, when not to treat them and how much influence to give parents in these decisions stand at the center of these debates.

If you missed the lecture or want to revisit the discussion, click to watch the recording.