Prof. Dr. Anna Elsner and her team have been part of the Med School since 1 September. Anna Elsner is a literary scholar and covers the field of Medical Humanities, which is represented for the first time at the University of St. Gallen with her chair. Alongside the Universities of Geneva and Fribourg, St. Gallen is thus the third university in Switzerland to have created a chair in this field, thus pursuing the interest of a holistic approach that also incorporates reflections from the humanities into medical studies. Prof. Dr. Elsner has diverse teaching and research experience at the interface of literature and medicine, both at literary and medical faculties, including the University of Oxford, the Center for Humanities and Health at King's College London, the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, the Hastings Center and the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the Institute for Biomedical Ethics and Medical History at the University of Zurich.

Anna Elsner is also integrating her ERC project, which revolves around euthanasia in legislative processes, literature, film and medicine, at the Med School. The five-year project, which is supported by a five-member research team and based at the University of St Gallen, McGill University in Montréal and Queen's University Belfast, started in March 2023. Part of the multidisciplinary team with expertise in philosophy, literature and law are Dr. Vanessa Rampton (McGill University), Dr. Jordan McCullough (Queen's University Belfast) as well as Dr. Marc Keller and Dr. Alexander Meienberger, who are based at the University of St. Gallen. Developments around the research project, as well as the world's first digital archive of texts and films on euthanasia, will (soon) be available via https://assistedlab.ch.