Four-Year Curriculum

 

First Year
First-year students are taught the cardinal principles of ethics -- justice, autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence -- and learn about the experience of illness. The course is broad -- students write a narrative of illness, based on real life, a personal experience or entirely fictional to reflect upon and understand how even a relatively common diagnosis (from the physician's perspective) can impact daily activities, significant relationships and even a patient's identity. Students write about the impact, for instance, of the change from being an autonomous person to becoming a dependent patient. Film, story and narrative and a rich choice of readings guide their development.

 

Second Year
Second-year students, in their progression from one module to another in an organ-based learning system, have the opportunity to see not only how scientific information illuminates clinical diagnosis and treatment of the heart, for example. The humanities courses offer readings and content that help students reflect on the different parts of the body and the impact of illness and disease from new perspectives.

 

Third Year
During their clinical rotations in their third year, the emphasis is on bedside teaching and students and their professors discuss cases in the wards help them to a practical and greater depth of understanding of ethical principles and practices, such as "informed consent" and "advance directives."

 

Fourth Year
The fourth-year course, in particular, prepares students for their new lives as interns and the course book includes intensive readings on end-of-life issues and chronic illness, the prevalence of physician addiction and suicide, medical errors and the practical application of ethical decision-making in situations they will face on a daily basis on the wards and in their practices.

 

As seniors, students have the opportunity to think about the roles and responsibilities of becoming a doctor. They listen to presentations by guest speakers such as Dax Cowart, whose moving story of suffering became a landmark ethics case about the right to die. They watch movies, such as Wit, The Doctor and other films that follow severely ill patients and their diagnoses and often have a theme of redemption as harried physicians learn through their own suffering what it means to be a patient.

 

Complementary Programs

The formal curriculum is complemented by organized activities that include special presentations by visiting scholars and artists, lunchtime discussion groups that examine ethics cases, art exhibits, and films.

 

The Center works to support student-initiated volunteer efforts in the student-run clinics at the Alpha Home and SA Metropolitan Ministries in San Antonio and in the colonias in Brownsville, Laredo and Corpus Christi, where medical students have the opportunity to work with patients prior to their clinical years.

 

The Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics, through the generosity of several donors, also makes available to students in their senior year an elective abroad at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, in south India, where students participate in healthcare delivery in a resource-poor environment and learn the value of bedside diagnosis skills in hospitals and clinics when availability of technology is not as routine as it is in the United States. Through many of these programs, students can choose to further broaden the experience of the humanities and ethics in their medical education and in their efforts to develop an understanding of and empathy with their patients.