The Complicated Legacy of Terry Wallis
In 2003, when Terry Wallis regained consciousness after spending 19 years in what his doctors thought was a permanent vegetative state, he helped to launch a golden age of brain science. Over the past two decades, writes Joseph J. Fins, “researchers have learned how to identify covert consciousness with functional neuroimaging, begun to develop drugs and devices that can accelerate the return of consciousness, and now even consider the ethical implications of these advances.”
But this remarkable scientific progress has not been accompanied by greater access to care. When Wallis fell ill in early 2022, his family’s struggle to find him an appropriate rehabilitation facility in their rural state was symptomatic of the difficulties facing marginalized people with disorders of consciousness.
Wallis’s death last year, writes Fins, “was a harsh reminder that the revolution in brain science … will remain incomplete until scientific progress is matched by an obligation to bring these advances into clinical practice in ways that are meaningful and just.”
Read more about how advances in medical knowledge produce new obligations to care.
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