HEALTH POLICY and ETHICS

When Katherine, a medical anthropologist, taught bioethics and health policy the field was opening up to problem-solving perspectives from social science and literature (1985-2000, UC Berkeley and Creighton University). Her research and teaching focused on helping health care providers and policymakers navigate the messy realms of ambiguity, miscommunication, money, inequity, prejudice, passions and power that often cloud clinical practice and public policy. 

Health care ethics and policy dilemmas provided ripe material for Katherine's first steps into writing fiction, beginning when several women colleagues met regularly to learn creative writing. Their best stories and poems were published as a book, The Arduous Touch.