하버드 의과대학의 의료윤리교육

At Harvard Medical School, various kinds of medical ethics education are offered to medical students to enhance their ethical sensitivity and sensibility. This paper reports one of the medical ethics courses, Moral Aspects of Dilemmas in Medical Practice. This course shares the same perspectives and contexts as those of medical education reformation beginning in the mid-1980s at Harvard. Using small group discussions, seminars, tutorials, the medical ethics course adopts student-centered, problem-based education. The course aims at helping students to recognize moral dimension of medical practice, to develop systematic moral reasoning, and to learn how to respect patients and colleagues. While professors and guest-lecturers stimulate and guide the classroom discussion, the students take an active role in the discussion. Various methods are employed for the class including case studies, narratives of patients and medical professionals, role plays, video watching, and lectures (although minimized). This course also conveys different methodology and theories of medical ethics such as casuistry, literature and ethics, principlism, virtue ethics, communitarian ethics, and ethics of care. Personal interviews with medical students who finished the course revealed that in general the students were satisfied with the contents and methods of the course. The students said that they learned ethical issues in contemporary medicine and how to deal with ethical dilemmas. Some students wanted to learn more about medical ethics and to participate in ethics committee in the future.