Message from the Dean

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the University of Toledo’s Medical Humanities magazine. The University of Toledo’s College of Medicine and Life Sciences exists alongside many other colleges within the University including the College of Arts and Letters, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Engineering, Law, Business and Innovation, Education, and Health and Human Services. This comprehensive University is well equipped to serve our mission of “improving the human condition” and is a rich environment to explore the subject of Medical Humanities.

In context, the training of physicians has been shaped greatly by the report written in 1910 by Abraham Flexner, under contract to the Carnegie Foundation on behalf of the American Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education. Central to the report was the idea that physicians should be trained to practice in a scientific manner and that medical faculty should be engaged in research. This led to a significant improvement in the quality and consistency of clinical care nationally and world-wide as diagnoses and treatments shifted from tradition- and expert-bound to evidence-based.

Attendant with that shift, there has been a long-standing concern about the real or potential loss of the human experience in medicine. This recognizes that the essential focus of healthcare is people, the subjects of medical care. These people live in a context of their unique lives; where they live, who they live and relate to, who they love, their religious beliefs, their cultural norms and other facets of their unique human experience(s). Medical humanities allow us to further bridge that gap by contemplating health and healthcare in the context of other important aspects of the human experience including art, music, film, philosophy, and literature.

In the current issue of the journal our authors touch on these subjects and in doing so, enrich our own appreciation for the humanities in medicine. Welcome to the magazine.

Christopher J. Cooper, M.D. (he/him/his)
Dean, College of Medicine & Life Sciences
Executive Vice President for Clinical Affairs
Vice Provost for Educational Health Affairs