The Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics

The Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics welcomes Dr. Ruth Berggren, Director. Berggren joined the faculty at the Health Science Center as an associate professor of medicine in 2006. She is assuming leadership from Dr. Abraham Verghese, who has just taken a position at Stanford University.

The Center offers an ambitious curriculum of literature, drama and the visual arts to integrate the humanities into medical education. It uses a formalized, three-pronged strategy emphasizing a clinically focused curriculum, service-based learning and bedside teaching to help students fulfill their highest potential as physicians.

"The humanities are vital in helping students maintain empathy with their patients," Verghese says. "Students come to medicine with a great capacity to imagine the suffering of others. In their clinical years, however, they are taught to take the patient's unique story of illness and translate it into the depersonalized language of the chart. We want to keep alive their innate humanity, integrity and empathy."