The purpose of this MEDICAL STUDENTS NEWSLETTER is to encourage the medical student to become aware of the moral dimension in the practice of medicine. Hopefully it will also encourage the student to cultivate good ethical habits that will continue throughout his or her medical career.

By its nature medicine is perhaps the most important of human vocations. Human beings exist in material bodies that are invariably subject to disease and ultimately death. Medicine is the profession that diagnoses and treats mental and physical disease and hopefully returns the patient to wholeness.

Humans, because they can reason and choose, have an ethical dimension. Choices can be good or bad, right or wrong. In medicine, because the subject matter can be serious and even life threatening, the ethical implications of the physicians actions are correspondingly more serious.

For a variety of reasons the science and art of medical ethics are less emphasized than other disciplines such as anatomy and biochemistry. This newsletter is an effort to correct this imbalance.

The Newsletter will be published quarterly. It will have three sections: 1) Medical Humanities, 2) Medical Ethics, and 3) Ethical Formation. Medicine is far more than a science; it is a profession, and indeed, a way of life. MEDICAL HUMANITIES will discuss the history of medicine as well as interactions of the art and science of medicine over the past 2500 years. MEDICAL ETHICS will give a general overview of the development of traditional ethics through the Enlightenment as well as the radical changes that have occurred in the past forty years. ETHICAL FORMATION will discuss how a medical student arrives at and habituates proper ethical behavior. This will arbitrarily be from a Christian perspective.

---

H O M E ~ D O N A T I O N S ~ E M A I L

---

NEWSLETTER No. 1 - WINTER 2001