Breathing in an Accelerated World: Temporality, Ethical Repertoires, and Medical Students’ Examination Texts on Advanced Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Medical students are commonly examined on ethically difficult clinical decisions, yet examination scripts have rarely been treated as a distinct empirical object in medical humanities. This article analyses 61 anonymised written examination responses from Danish medical students addressing acute respiratory failure in a fictional patient with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study is framed as a genre analysis of examination texts, operationalised through repeated close reading, inductive coding of recurrent textual moves, and abductive interpretation through Hartmut Rosa’s concepts of acceleration and resonance. Four ethical repertoires were identified: accelerated stabilisation; prognostic triage and the limit of intervention; distributed responsibility and the search for a legitimate pause; and fragile resonance through attention to wishes, dignity, and palliative alternatives. Across the corpus, students wrote judgement through temporal distinctions between urgency and delay, reversibility and progression, and escalation and proportionate limitation. The findings do not show professionalism as such, but rather the institutionally legitimate ways in which professional judgement is made legible under assessment. Examination scripts matter for medical humanities because they make curricular normativity and evaluative pressure textually visible, showing how future clinicians are taught to write responsibility, uncertainty, and care into the same ethical scene. These repertoires also render an ableist prognostic imagination institutionally legible—one in which ventilator-dependent life is readily scripted in advance as a future to be avoided rather than supported—linking the temporal analysis to critical disability studies’ account of the curative imaginary.