AN INITIATIVE FOR A MEDICAL HUMANITIES SCHOLAR
PROGRAM AT GWU FROM THE MTM DEPARTMENT, HUMAN SCIENCES,
AND UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS
Dear Peter:
I was very excited to see the proposal for the Certificate Program in a GWU Scholars Program in Medical Humanities. As I had said to Ray Loomis---"I cannot imagine anything more directly down the middle of my strike zone!"
As you know, I am very much involved in the Human Sciences Program, having maintained a registration each semester for the past nine years as a Ph.D. candidate graduate student, having completed all the Comps and requirements four years ago in May, and presently "ABD" for the degree, which I must secure within the next eighteen months.. I am an advisee of Alf Hiltebeitel, who has been, until the rotation of the assignment, Director of the Human Sciences Program, and my thesis advisor is Peter Caws, University Professor of Philosophy. I had worked closely with Prof. Nasr on his interest in a "sacred science" and with Prof Schaffner in the course work leading up to the thesis committee stage, and had previously achieved the International Affairs degree from the Elliot School in the global relationship of interest to Prof Rosenau. I had taken several seminars with Amitai Etzioni for a clean sweep of our University Professors in being at least one of the few who could appreciate the resources across a narrow street from a Medical School situated on a major University Campus
I am the presenting soon in a special seminar at the University of Virginia's Institute for Bioethics in the coming months in Charlottesville, now directed by our own GWU Ph.D. ethicist Jonathon Moreno. I have been collaborating with Dan Wikler, bioethicist chief at WHO Geneva, and a prior candidate for one of the GWU University Professorships before he left the University of Wisconsin on leave to his current International position. Another member of my thesis committee is a campus regular on the subject of bioethics, Prof. Harry Yeide who might have useful input, and the last member of my committee was also director of my anthropology thesis, Alison Brooks, coincidentally mother of my junior medical student advisee, Elizabeth Yellen.
I am even more enthusiastic about the potential of this program on a re-reading of the brochure and would like to help support it in any way I can, especially if I add my overdue credentialing completion in the collaborating program
I am in accord with the philosophic background statements regarding the erosion in medical education's academic standing as a learned profession over the devalued trade school model, such that the term "Medical Scholar" has come to have an oxymoronic ring to it---for a generation with respect to the humanities, and within the last decade, even from the perspective of a bench laboratory scientist. I attach an article from the NYT that might be symptomatic of the devaluation of the professional scholarly stature of this learned "human science", with "diversity" meant to imply only the narrowest of foci.
I have attempted to focus on the numerator value of what we can contribute in humanitarian value rather than the denominator of what resources are expended in health care--a surrender to the dismal science for evaluation of our intellectual and compassionate efforts. I have become something of a resource for the disgruntled and disillusioned among health care workers who have felt abused and diverted by a system error into activities for which they have not been prepared and in which their efforts are found to be not very rewarding. One such individual heard me in a presentation last month before the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in New Orleans and wrote to me (attached Nov-A-5) sensing a joy in medicine he would like to recapture in the volunteer foreign service to the needy I had suggested.
I would like to discuss further with you the application of this proposal to some of my alumni organizations---such as the last to carry the name "Clinical Scholar" when I was the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar here at GWU 1975--1979. Other sources come to mind: Commonwealth Fund, Pew Charitable Trust and Mac Arthur---and for these suggestions I would like to discuss the re-extension of the invitation to Paul Farmer to come as our guest and advise us at GWU how to make some of these Global Medical Diplomacy outreach efforts sustainable.
Thanks!
GWG