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Center for Urgan Bioethics and Humanities

CENTER FOR URBAN BIOETHICS AND HUMANITIES

Welcome to the Center for Urban Bioethics and Humanities home page.  The recently established Center for Urban Bioethics and Humanities at Temple University School of Medicine serves to create and foster an academic culture that enriches the education of medical students, physicians, health professionals and citizens of the Philadelphia region. The tools to do so are embedded within the disciplines of the humanities and bioethics, which will ultimately serve to enrich the practice of medicine. While numerous centers with a similar focus exist in medical institutions around the country, the Temple Center is unique in that it focuses on the densely populated, poverty stricken urban environment of northern Philadelphia that surrounds the Center and Temple University Hospital. This niche not only provides challenging and unique ethical quandaries for the modern practice of medicine, but also provides the practitioner with rich and diverse cultural knowledge.

 

The Center strives to refocus the attention of the modern physician to humane, holistic and comprehensive care of the patient and the urban community through innovative and collaborative efforts in academics, research and community service. Given the current climate of health care in the United States and the all-too-frequent marginalization of humanistic patient care, the emphasis on bioethics and humanities as a staple of the education of health care professionals changes the ways in which care givers consider patients and their illnesses. The Center promulgates effective patient care within a context that deals with the entirety of individuals, including their successes and their struggles instead of a narrow context that focuses solely on disease processes. By integrating academic initiatives with community service, the very moral compass of medicine shifts towards the humanistic and ethical treatment of individuals, ultimate goal of the Center for Urban Bioethics and Humanities.