Our chapter explores the ethical and systemic challenges faced by healthcare staff when caring for an adolescent patient boarding in the emergency room (ER). We use the case of Samantha, an indigenous adolescent, brought to the ER after trying to elope from her youth treatment center. Samantha’s prolonged stay in the ER highlights significant gaps in healthcare; society’s struggle to address the needs of vulnerable populations; and the healthcare staff’s efforts to fulfill the duties of beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Samantha’s case underscores the need for improved clinical and institutional processes and support systems. We advocate for better access to ethics support, enhanced community resources, and a more inclusive approach to care that considers the unique needs of marginalized individuals. Our case also reflects on the emotional and moral toll experienced by healthcare providers, exacerbated by systemic injustice and an unclear pathway to access our ethics committee at the time. We hope this case provides insights for healthcare systems to develop comprehensive strategies to support adolescents boarding in the ER ensuring their dignity.

This chapter looks at the mid-century complaint movement and early modern memory culture, with a focus on George Cavendish’s collection of individual stories, Metrical Visions, and its connections with various memory networks. Often cloaked in an outward conservativism affirming traditional hierarchies, the mid-century complaint poem demonstrates networks of power very different from those depicted in medieval tragic poetry. Composed of the imagined testimonies of trauma victims, speaking from the grave, complaint locates individual memories and affects within political systems. Less famous than its almost-contemporary complaint collection The Mirror for Magistrates, Metrical Visions combines the traditional protest complaint with an awareness of the various facets of an individual memory and the role that networks in those memories. Mid-century complaint invents a way of speaking that evolves into the Shakespearean soliloquy. As such, complaint poetry acts as a bridge between medieval tragic poetry and early modern dramatic tragedy.