About Bioethics and Medical Humanities
The fields of Bioethics and Medical Humanities bring together a variety of disciplines – philosophy, history, art, law, anthropology, and literature – to bear on pressing medical issues and challenges that do not always have a scientific solution or explanation. Through this multifaceted approach, the fields of Bioethics and Medical Humanities expand the medical toolkit to better understand and respond to complex issues of illness, technology, and human values.
Medical ethics establishes professional norms, encourages a constant focus on humanity, and brings thoughtful solutions to the challenges of health care and a rich understanding of medicine’s cultural complexity to students, faculty, healthcare clinicians and staff, and the public.
Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Feinberg
The integration of bioethics and medical humanities in Feinberg’s MD curriculum, the MA program, GME training, and continuing clinician education gives practitioners methodological skills for identifying and addressing ethical dilemmas, and reflective skills for delivering empathic patient care. Through innovative research and community engagement Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Feinberg is dedicated to thought leadership in our changing dynamic healthcare environment.
Key Terms
Following are brief explanations to some key terms commonly used within bioethics and medical humanities.
Bioethics
A discipline that includes theoretical and practical approaches to the ethics of interacting with all living things, from all areas of medical ethics to the ethics of research.
Clinical Ethics
A practical discipline that provides a structured approach to help healthcare providers identify, analyze, and resolve ethical issues in clinical medicine.
Research Ethics
The ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research, includes protection of human and animal subject.
Bioethics Scholarship
Bioethics scholarship includes a broad range of academic approaches and topics. It includes overarching theories about how medicine could or should be practiced, empirical work surveying what current practice actually looks like, and case reports of instructive single events.
Medical Humanities
An interdisciplinary field of medicine which includes the humanities (e.g., literature, philosophy, history), the values-oriented social sciences (e.g., anthropology, sociology, law) and the arts (e.g. theater, film, poetry, graphics), and their application to medical education and practice.
Professionalism
The habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, technical skills, clinical reasoning, emotions, values, and reflection in daily practice for the benefit of the individual and community being served.