Guest Director's Corner

The Parable of Dr. Benny: A Journey through the Clouds To Reach the Summit of “Good Physician Mountain”

By John Yoon, MD and Fabrice Jotterand, PhD, MA

The “Parable of Dr. Benny” Series is Part 3 of an extended personal reflection on Character & Professional Development (Links to Part 1 and Part 2).  This essay was inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress and David Irby & Stanley Hamstra’s article in Academic Medicine, “Parting the Clouds: Three Professionalism Frameworks in Medical Education.”

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be the arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

-T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets

“There are two ways of getting home;

and one of them is to stay there.

The other is to walk 'round the whole world

till we come back to the same place.”

— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

This is the story of Med Ed Pilgrim’s Progress:

Once upon a time, Dr. Benny experienced an existential crisis as a fledgling medical educator freshly minted from his residency training: How do I help others become the proverbial “Good Physician?”

Perspective/Opinion

Virtue Ethics and Character Formation in Medicine: Our Approach at Columbia’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

By Lydia S. Dugdale, MD, MAR; Charlene Sathi, MS and Ashley John Moyse, PhD

In this essay, our colleagues from Columbia’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics describe a vision of curricular innovation focusing on the formation of virtues and the cultivation of flourishing in health profession students …

Columbia’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics (CCME) aims to foster flourishing relationships between patients, doctors, and other medical professionals by supporting the ethical formation of medical trainees; encouraging true intellectual friendship across difference; and facilitating public engagement on diverse ethical issues.

Perspective/Opinion

The Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing at Johns Hopkins University

By Margaret Chisolm, MD and Paul McHugh, MD

In this essay, our colleagues from Johns Hopkins University share their experience with character education and virtue development of medical students through an intentional focus on asking foundational questions often avoided in traditional discourse on professionalism ...

“I mean simply to make the human being more human, and that is some task for the teacher that I try to be...”

Elie Wiesel

The practice of medicine is a moral enterprise – one human being caring for another – and the ‘big questions’ long considered in Western philosophy and the arts are central to physician training. This is true now more than ever, as physicians face growing pressure to set aside age-old norms and conscientious judgment in favor of “respecting” patients’ wishes – including their wishes to be killed or to remake themselves through hormones and plastic surgery – and medical trainees and practitioners are reporting unprecedented levels of burnout and alienation. Yet medical education continues to avoid examining these foundational questions – what it means to be human, to be a physician, and to lead a good life – with its students.

Perspective/ Opinion

The Doctor with a Golden Heart

By Sabena Y.  Jameel, MD, PhD

In this essay, our colleague from across the “pond” at University of Birmingham (UK) and lead author of Ethics and the Good Doctor: Character in the Professional Domain, shares her insights on virtue-based approaches to professional formation in medicine over the course of her PhD dissertation work in Practical Wisdom ...

“I knew a doctor who was honest, but gentle with his honesty, and was loving, but careful with his love, who was disciplined without being rigid, and right without a stain of arrogance, who was self-questioning without self-doubt, introspective and reflective and in the same moment, decisive, who was strong, hard, adamant, but all those things laced with tenderness and understanding, a doctor who worshipped his calling without worshipping himself, who was busy beyond belief, but who had the time – time to smile, to chat, to touch the shoulder and take the hand, and who had time enough for death as well as life”                                                    

-Michael A LaCombe MD

I have laminated this quote and put it in my consultation room. I came across it in 2013 when I started my PhD which took biographies of empirically derived wise doctors. This aspirational quote inspires me, it inspires my patients too and we often divert from the clinical presentation to a conversation about good doctors. I have shared it with medical educators, and they too see something beautiful within it.

Perspective/Opinion

The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School

By Farr Curlin, MD; Warren Kinghorn, MD, ThD and Brett McCarty, ThD

Here our colleagues at Duke Divinity School highlight a more tradition-specific example of how institutions with historic religious affiliations (e.g., Jewish, Catholic health care institutions, etc.) might offer a virtue-based approach to medical education that more closely align educational initiatives with a tradition’s theological understanding and practices of a faithful health care vocation ...

The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke Divinity School seeks the renewal of health care through the theological and moral formation of health practitioners. Our mission is based on the foundational belief that education in health care is not just intellectual, but also moral. As an initiative grounded in Christian faith and practice, we seek to develop health professionals marked by their purposefulness, wisdom, justice, and respect for the dignity of every human as made in God’s image.

Perspective/Opinion

Cultivating Character and Preparing Future Physicians to Flourish: Curricular Innovations to Character Formation in Pre-Clinical Medical Education and a Vision for the Character Collaborative for Medical Educators

By Anne Jeffrey, PhD and Kathryn J. Rowland, MD, MPHS

Our colleagues at the University of Chicago and Baylor University offer an example of how virtue-based approaches in medical education might be implemented earlier in the formation of future clinicians—pre-medical education, for instance—and then offer a vision for a Character Collaborative for Medical Educators ...

Physicians care for those that are sick and suffering, patients who are weak and vulnerable, who are dependent and trusting upon the physician’s knowledge and commitment to provide excellent care. Oftentimes the privilege to provide this care comes at the personal sacrifice of the physician - hard work, early mornings and late nights, and time away from family and friends are the rule rather than the exception. With such professional demands, it can be reasonably argued that a physician should be an individual of outstanding character. Character determines our responses in times of stress and fatigue. During medical training and in medical practice, grueling hours, long lists of patients to treat and care for, each with an increasing complexity of medical and social problems, and the high-stakes decision making environment call character in to action. And yet, little to no time in the very lengthy process of medical education is devoted to individual character development.