About the Center
The Center is committed to supporting reflective practice in health care and in science, by bringing to these fields the resources of ethics and the humanities. We do this through teaching, writing, public speaking, conducting research and working in many other ways with students, practitioners, and the general public. Our work is integrative: each activity informs the others, and all draw upon (and draw together) the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. We seek to deepen our field's response to cultural diversity and to increase the diversity of those active within it. We are an educational resource for the university and the state, and for national as well as international audiences.
In all its work the Center's core faculty depend upon the contributions of its faculty liaisons and associate faculty. These associates participate in the Center's activities, are a source of information and advice, and serve as liaisons with their home colleges.
Teaching Commitments
Our principal teaching commitment is to medical, nursing and veterinary students at Michigan State University; we also teach other groups, especially graduate students, medical residents, and undergraduates. In all of our teaching, from semester-long courses through one hour lectures, from drawing up curricula to conducting workshops, we try to collaborate with other faculty in the colleges we serve. In our teaching, as in all our work, we emphasize the ways in which theory and practice illumine one another. Having helped establish bioethics curricula in several colleges, we now seek to strengthen the presence of other humanities disciplines in the health care and science programs. Toward this end we work closely with the Program in Bioethics, Humanities and Society (BHS) in the Colleges of Human Medicine, Social Science and Arts and Letters.
Research & Scholarship
Our writing and research projects are intrinsically interdisciplinary, drawing upon the insights of the humanities and the findings of science to support reflective practice. Because of our practical and integrative commitments, we highly value collaborative work which reaches a diverse audience, both professional and public.
Public Service
Community outreach is at the core of all
we do: we are proud to be part of a major land grant institution and of health
care colleges which are community based. Our public service activities --
workshops, public speaking, advising or consulting, and so on -- are varied,
chosen in part for their contribution to our teaching and scholarship, but
also for their usefulness to practicing health care professionals and researchers.
These involvements help us understand the institutions about which we teach
and write, and help us develop fruitful working relationships with practitioners.
We especially hope to deepen the level of public, democratic deliberation
about health and science policy.
Newsletter - Medical Humanities Report
The Center's newsletter, Medical Humanities Report, is published 3 times during the academic year.
A Brief History of the Center
(Parts excerpted from the College of Human Medicine M.D. Magazine, Fall 1997)
Founding
The Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences began in 1977 as the Medical Humanities Program, under the direction of Andrew D. Hunt, M.D., founding dean of the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine (CHM). Convinced that the practice of medicine was more than just applied physical and biological science, Dr. Hunt drew on faculty from the Department of Philosophy who helped extend this patient-centered focus to include humanities and philosophy – in addition to the behavioral sciences, already an intrinsic part of the CHM curriculum. With support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program hired several new faculty who developed required ethics curricula in the Colleges of Human Medicine, Osteopathic Medicine, Nursing and Veterinary Medicine. Supported at the time by six different colleges, the Program had the additional advantage of functioning as a cross-University resource with an interdisciplinary approach.
Evolving
When Dr. Hunt retired in 1985, Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., assumed the helm. In 1988 the program was granted "Center" status, and renamed the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (CEHLS) to mark its involvement in disciplines beyond biomedicine. Under Dr. Brody’s 20-year guidance, CEHLS expanded its identity, its faculty, and its scope. The Center’s mission statement opens with the words, "committed to supporting reflective practice in health care and in science, by bringing to these fields the resources of ethics and humanities".
Current
The discipline of medical ethics and humanities evolved from those seminal ethical issues associated with the doctor-patient dyad, life-extending technologies and the ethical treatment of human subjects to include micro/macro level social policy questions such as: What economic issues most affect health care? How can physicians best deliver health care in a pluralistic society? How can physicians contain costs while preserving a trusting relationship with their patients? And legal questions as well: Who should make medical decisions for minors? What should be the relationship between industry and medicine? Notably, issues that had the appearance of exotic science fiction in the 1970s, such as cloning, and mapping the human genome, are today’s twenty-first century realities. These and other developments in medicine and health introduce ever-more challenging questions for bioethics consideration.
Today, under the guidance of Center Director Tom Tomlinson, Ph.D., the Center’s eight core faculty members direct their ongoing attention to understanding varied aspects of the human condition including chronic illness, birthing, aging, disability, international research ethics, and spirituality, to name only a few. To address the rapidly expanding bioethics agenda, and also to meet its many teaching responsibilities, CEHLS highly values the collaborative support of its 40-plus Associate Faculty members who come from within as well as outside of the University. Furthermore, appointed Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences Liaisons facilitate effective communication between CEHLS and nine MSU Colleges.
Affiliated Degree Programs
In addition to providing required bioethics curricula for Michigan State University’s four health science Colleges, the Center’s sister unit, the Program in Bioethics, Humanities and Society (BHS) offers an undergraduate specialization as well as a master’s degree. These two options are available to those students who wish to merge bioethics multidisciplinary theory and scholarship with the study of medicine and health care delivery. Beyond the program’s multidisciplinary on-campus curricular offerings, BHS affords students international opportunities to examine the ethics and history of health care systems through Study Abroad programs in London and in Costa Rica.
Through its history and joint faculty appointments, CEHLS is intimately linked with MSU’s Department of Philosophy where those philosophy graduate students who elect a bioethics focus can work with Center faculty.
