KCOM hosts Medical Ethics Night

Nearly 200 students, staff, and guests witnessed Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, give his lecture, “Little Boy and the Seven Teachings: Virtue and Professionalism in Medicine,” on December 3.

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation granted funding for the event that included the lecture, dinner, and discussion topics and was held at A.T. Still University’s Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (ATSU-KCOM) in Kirksville, Mo.

This is Dr. Brody’s second visit to ATSU; he gave the KCOM commencement speech in 2004 and said that he loves giving insight to future medical professionals.

“There is no way for me to pay back all the valuable time and information that my educators instilled upon me, so you pay it forward to your students,” Dr. Brody said.

Dr. Brody’s talk touched on a number of issues including not only what to do in ethical dilemmas, but also maintaining professionalism in everyday work and keeping healthy relationships.

“If we let them be, students have wonderful moral values and a lot of moral commitment to what they do,” Dr. Brody said. “One of the things that we educators have to worry about is why is it that so many of them, by the time they are done, don’t seem to have the same commitment to those moral values as they did in the beginning? What is it that we educators do to them that seems to drive some of that out of them and makes some of them more cynical and less committed to what they’re doing?”