Overview

There is a place where the human side of medicine is elevated, examined, and revered. Our Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics, situated in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine in the Renaissance School of Medicine, is devoted to training medical students and health professionals as well as conducting high impact research and scholarship in the three thematic components reflected in its name. While we maintain and develop curricula on these three themes with a primary focus on the medical school, we are also actively engaged in undergraduate and graduate teaching across the university. We maintain a productive research portfolio combining work in the traditional humanities including bioethics, narrative medicine, health care justice, health policy, and history; clinically-oriented scholarship centered on compassion, altruism, and palliative care; and NIH funded scientific research. Building on a rich legacy of four decades of exemplary medical humanism at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, the Center was founded in August of 2008.