Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics

The Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, is a university-wide program devoted to investigating and teaching the three thematic components reflected in its name. It has a fourfold mission to:

  1. provide excellent education to students and professionals in healthcare and throughout the entire university, extending to the wider community.
  2. contribute outstanding humanistic scholarship and empirical research that engages faculty networks across the university.>
  3. promote dialogue engaging all fields and disciplines on the momentous questions raised by evolving biotechnologies.
  4. provide local, regional, and national service to health professionals, policy makers, and the public.

All three themes reflected in the Center title are taken with equal seriousness:

Compassionate Care
The art of healing requires compassion and emotional intelligence on the part of clinicians,  yet many patients and their families do not experience care in this basic sense. As the connection between healing and emotions becomes better understood scientifically, we need to renew a commitment to compassionate care that is grounded in leading edge research, scholarship, and educational efforts. Compassion includes the pursuit of justice and access to healthcare in a time when patients can be adversely impacted by the stresses of dealing with the healthcare delivery system.

Bioethics
Bioethics is the systematic study of the moral dimensions – including moral vision, decisions, conduct, and policies – of the life sciences and health care, employing a variety of ethical methodologies in an interdisciplinary setting. From the beginning to the end of life, biotechnologies and healthcare raise every conceivable question about human dignity and the very future of human nature itself. Nearly all academic disciplines can and do contribute to the ongoing discussions in bioethics.

Medical Humanities
It is through the humanities that health professionals are sensitized to the patient as a person coping with illness against the background of a healthcare system that can often be de-humanizing. It is through the writing of novels, short stories and poems that professionals and those coping with illness are able to express their insights and experiences. We include spirituality, music, and the arts in the broad scope of medical humanities.

Click Here to visit the Center's homepage.