SOURCE: “Literature and Bioethics: The Tension in Goals and Styles,” in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 7, 1988, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Terry and Williams include “The Lottery” in a discussion of examples of literature that demonstrates lessons in medical ethics.

The power of literary representations of illness and medical care has been as apparent to the bioethics community as it has to all others in the medical humanities. Short stories and poems that are evocative, complex, and imaginatively challenging have been used to supplement or supplant the traditional case study as instruments for raising ethical issues. At best, these literary works more vividly present moral questions and even raise some kinds of issues that case studies leave out. Philosophic understanding of a given moral problem can be enriched by a literary account that places issues in a context of the lives and activities of particular characters. At a...