From left: Nada Gligorov, PhD, Associate Professor, Bioethics Program; Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD; and Paul J. Cummins, PhD, Education Program Manager, Medical Education, Bioethics Program.
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s Bioethics Program hosted its First Annual Medical Student Ethics Conference, a forum designed to provide medical students across the country with an opportunity to discuss and resolve the ethical challenges they may encounter during physician training. A call for abstracts was issued to medical schools in the region and to several academic medicine and medical ethics organizations. Eight students from six medical schools gave poster presentations that examined such topics as “Anatomy and Cadavers as First Patients,” and “Anticipating Obligations as Future Physicians.” Keynote Speakers Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD, University Professor of Medical Humanities, George Washington University, and Robert Klitzman, MD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Director of the Masters of Bioethics Program, Columbia University Medical Center, discussed, respectively, personal and historical reflections on racism, medicine, and bioethics; and the role reversal experienced when physicians become patients. The conference, funded by The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, took place on Saturday, March 19, and drew 65 participants.