Many members of the clinical and basic science departments at The Brody School of Medicine and clinicians in private practice have supported and participated in courses, seminars and conferences sponsored by the Department of Medical Humanities. Every course and seminar we teach has at least one instructor from our six-member department whose primary area of specialization is medical humanities. The decision to teach with clinical and basic science faculty, made in the first days of the program in 1978, has shaped the character of and, we believe, contributed to the success of our program.

First, team-teaching keeps the Medical Humanities faculty and its programs focused on issues of importance to clinicians and basic science faculty. The possibility of cloning human embryos raises many fascinating theoretical issues in ethics, law and policy, but is unlikely to affect most clinicians’ daily activities as much as understanding the nature of duties to gain consent, honor confidentiality, or set end-of-life priorities. A practical focus not only engages students’ interests and prepares them to deal with the problems that they will face, but it also encourages them to think more completely about such issues. We also like to use the journals or literature from their own clinical or basic science fields in our required courses. This helps students to identify the beliefs and values underlying their own practices and to understand why studying them is important in their careers.

Second, team-teaching promotes faculty development. The Medical Humanities faculty, clinicians, and basic scientists bring different perspectives from which we can learn more about the issues we address. In addition to educating each other, team-teaching helps those outside our department to learn about our faculty’s contributions in research, service and teaching. Not surprisingly, this understanding has been important to us within the life of the institution. Third, team-teaching supports the goals of integration of material within the curriculum. Many clinical and basic science colleagues who teach with us examine, adapt and reinforce the concepts and issues through their own teaching. Consequently, we consider the clinicians and basic scientists who participate with us, some of whom have taken courses or have advanced degrees in ethics or other areas of the humanities, to be essential in fostering our department’s educational goals of having students continue to give critical attention to the moral and social problems we discuss with them.

We have sixty-five contact hours in all four years of the required medical school curriculum, making us one of the largest humanities programs in any medical school. We began offering our semester-long course in research ethics for Ph.D. candidates in the basic biomedical sciences at The Brody School of Medicine in 1993. We asked basic scientists to help us create this course, which is now required for all Ph.D. students, and they have team-taught it with us since its inception.

Finally, team-teaching brings credibility to the program by bringing students in contact with clinicians or basic scientists who value the humanities and its methods for addressing rationally complex, nonscientific problems. Team-teaching is arranged by mutual consent, and some teaching teams have been intact for years. For example, Spencer O. Raab was section head of Hematology/Oncology until his death in 1993. He sought me out the first week the humanities program began, when I joined the faculty in 1978. He said that he believed in the importance of a humanities program and wanted to help make it a success. We team-taught together every year thereafter, and I learned a great deal from him about the clinical issues he faced, such as his concerns about clinical trials, and how to fulfill duties to be truthful and gain consent. We would sometimes prompt each other, such as my saying, "Why don’t you tell them what words you use to tell patients…"