50 Years of "A Humanistic Approach to Medicine"

Humanism and compassion

Brown develops doctors who bring a sense of deeper humanity to their role and to their patients.

As a member of the Medical School’s admissions committee, Sigal Family Professor of Humanistic Medicine Fred Schiffman, MD, P’96 MD’00, has an unfiltered view of prospective students’ understanding of Brown. “The students who interview for the Medical School have already identified Brown as a place where medical humanism is at the forefront,” he says. “They ask me very sophisticated questions about how this is part of the curriculum.” This reputation was built with intention by founding dean Stan Aronson, MD, a neuropathologist. “He was an extraordinary listener and servant leader,” Schiffman recalls. “He was a preeminent medical humanist.”

Schiffman says that these values aren’t just shown through programming: they are part of the culture, and can be found across the Medical School’s entire community. Prospective students feel it before they even arrive, and faculty choose Brown because they see how they can contribute in ways that align with these ideas. “We are people with heart,” Schiffman says, “and we want people with heart.”

Creativity, innovation, and discovery

Exceptional research fuels every successive generation of humanistic medical care.

This past summer, Brown President Christina H. Paxson announced that the University is making ambitious plans to increase investment in research across the institution in the coming decade. One major driver of that increase will be translational research at the Medical School.

Indeed, Dean Mukesh Jain sees Brown’s bold aim as perfectly aligned with the Medical School’s reputation for training deeply human and compassionate doctors. “The translational research that we pursue will help us find treatments and cures that can help us heal not just the individual patients we see as doctors, but also many more around the world,” he says. “These efforts will help us pursue our mission at the largest scale.”

While research has been part of the School’s work since the beginning—the Biomedical Research Laboratory was six years old when the Medical School was founded—it has significantly accelerated its research program over the past decade. Under the guidance of former Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Jack A. Elias, MD, external research funding more than doubled between 2013 and 2019. The Division of Biology and Medicine accounts for about a third of all research dollars at Brown.

Social responsibility, both locally and globally

At Brown, students and faculty feel an obligation to create a better world for all.

Gisel Bello MD’22 couldn’t quite put words to the distinctive energy she experienced when she arrived on campus for her first medical school interview in 2017, but she could feel it among the students and faculty: a mix of deep humanity and a profound desire to make the world a better place: “a certain oomph,” she recalled.

Five years later, on the cusp of her graduation, she knew exactly the words to describe that feeling. “The ‘oomph’ I felt is social responsibility,” she said as part of her remarks for the 50 Years of Medicine opening celebration in April. “As medical students at Brown, we are leaders devoted to improving the health and wellness of everyone. That means that sometimes we have to challenge the status quo. That means that when we find inequity in the systems we are part of, we challenge and hold to account the institutions responsible for those systems.”