A little over a year ago, Lainie Ross<\/a>, Dean\u2019s Professor and chair of the Medical Center\u2019s Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, crossed Elmwood Avenue and walked into Rush Rhees Library to pay a visit to Peter Christensen<\/a>, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center.<\/p>\n Ross, a pediatrician and an ethicist with a PhD in philosophy, had arrived in Rochester just months earlier from the University of Chicago\u2019s McLean Center for Medical Ethics. The Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics<\/a> was brand new, and she had been hired to shape and lead it, along with the Paul M. Schyve, MD Center for Bioethics<\/a>. Christensen, a scholar of architectural and urban design and the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, was halfway through his first year heading the Humanities Center<\/a>, and only its second director. Finding their footing in new roles, they each sought inspiration and a potential partner in elevating the profile and practice of the humanities across the University.<\/p>\n It was a fruitful meeting.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a kind of immediate synergy,\u201d says Christensen, who since January also serves as associate dean of the School of Arts & Sciences<\/a>. \u201cI was taken by her incredible initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n Says Ross, \u201cWe met, and within five minutes, it was like we were old friends.\u201d<\/p>\n They traded notes on everything from their shared roots as New Yorkers to their thoughts on the academic literature on hospital design. They found they harbored similar views about the relationship between the humanities and the life sciences.<\/p>\n Viewed through the modern academy\u2019s operational lens, with its divisions into departments and programs, the humanities and the life sciences can seem to occupy separate universes. But seen in terms of the problems they address, they can be \u2028inseparable.<\/p>\n Ross describes the humanities as \u201cembedded\u201d in medical research and practice. And nowhere has that been more the case than at Rochester.<\/p>\n Elected to the National Academy of Medicine<\/a> last year, Ross has written and presented internationally on ethical issues raised by organ transplantation, genetics and genomics, clinical research with human subjects, and multiple aspects of pediatrics.\u00a0After three decades at Chicago, she\u2019d grown frustrated.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had a very narrow role for ethics as just clinical ethics at the bedside,\u201d she says of the school\u2019s medical establishment. \u201cI wanted [to see] a much broader, 360-degree role.\u201d<\/p>\n She calls the opportunity that arose at Rochester \u201cthe perfect job,\u201d and shares an oft-told story that\u2019s still not widely known outside the University. In short, the School of Medicine and Dentistry<\/a> was the birthplace of an influential approach to patient care and research called the biopsychosocial model.<\/p>\n With roots stretching back to the 1940s, the model was formally proposed and described by Medical Center psychiatrist George Engel<\/a> in a landmark article, \u201cThe Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine\u201d<\/a> published in the journal Science<\/em> in 1977.<\/p>\n The deceptively simple model transformed medical education. As Engel explained, a physician should not be trained to look exclusively at physiology as though a patient was best seen as a system of organs. \u201cThe physician\u2019s basic professional knowledge and skills must span the social, psychological and biological, for his decisions and actions on the patient\u2019s behalf involve all three,\u201d he wrote, at a time when physicians were still overwhelmingly male.<\/p>\n The biopsychosocial model opened a door to collaboration between researchers in medical science and other disciplines, including the humanities. In 1981, the Medical Center established a Division of Medical Humanities, and Ross credits its first director, Kathryn Montgomery, a scholar of English literature, with a groundbreaking development. Montgomery\u2019s book Doctors\u2019 Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge<\/em><\/a> (Princeton University Press, 1991) \u201cis sort of the precursor to all of narrative medicine,\u201d Ross says, alluding to a type of medical practice that considers the role of storytelling\u2014the patient\u2019s, the doctor\u2019s, and the interaction between the two that creates yet another narrative that guides clinical decision making.<\/p>\n Under the leadership of its last director, physician and art historian Stephanie Brown Clark<\/a>, the division expanded into the arts, partnering with the University\u2019s Memorial Art Gallery<\/a>, and more recently, with the Eastman School of Music<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Ross puts it, the Medical Center \u201cwas among the first in the country with a humanities division, and now, is one of just eight academic medical centers in the nation to have a\u00a0dedicated humanities and bioethics department.\u201d<\/p>\n The decision to elevate a division into a department is no mere administrative detail. It has allowed Ross the chance to develop that \u201c360-degree role\u201d for ethics in a way she couldn\u2019t at Chicago. She calls Mark Taubman<\/a>, the CEO of the Medical Center and dean of the medical school until he stepped down this past year to resume his position in cardiology, \u201cvisionary\u201d in making the critical decision.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the most important things I do is what I call embedding,\u201d Ross says. Health humanities and bioethics \u201chave to be embedded across the entire clinical and research spectrum.\u201d<\/p>\n That means standing on an equal footing with clinical departments.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re doing a lecture on neurology, I want to be included, because I\u2019ll talk about determinations of death and the ethical issues [that presents],\u201d she says. \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about cardiology, I\u2019m going to talk about the ethics and humanity of what it means to get somebody else\u2019s heart in a heart transplant. No matter what area of medicine you talk about, I can come up with an ethical issue. And if I can\u2019t, I can just go back to the fundamental doctor-patient relationship, because that\u2019s a moral relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n By addressing the ethical implications of medical research and practice, she has been able to bring additional grant funding to Medical Center researchers. \u201cWhen you write a grant, you have to be innovative,\u201d she says. \u201cBy bringing in an ethics component, we\u2019re saying, \u2018we\u2019re doing great science, but what are its implications?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n But Ross didn\u2019t want such embedding to be limited to ethical philosophy or to the Medical Center. That\u2019s why, she says, \u201cI reached over to Peter.\u201d<\/p>\n