Issues in Medical Ethics

Instructor: Elizabeth Reis
Tuesdays, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM at Macaulay
Wednesdays, 11:30 PM – 1:00 PM at Hospital
Macaulay Classroom 204
Course Code: MHC 324
Modality: In-person

Open to Juniors and Seniors

This unique class will blend interdisciplinary scholarship on bioethics with an applied perspective on ethical decision-making in the clinical setting. Drawing from literature in diverse fields such as philosophy, medicine, law, history, sociology, anthropology, and public policy, we will explore basic concepts in bioethics and see how they are utilized in the hospital with real patients and real physicians. By turning the hospital into a classroom, students will come to appreciate how theoretical discussions of important ethical concerns like patient autonomy, end-of-life care, or the limits of informed consent are applied in a medical setting.

This class will be a team-taught class by Professor Elizabeth Reis from Macaulay and Dr. Ezra Gabbay, a physician at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital. We will meet twice each week: on Tuesday late afternoons, we’ll meet at the Macaulay building,
and on Wednesday mornings we’ll meet at the hospital at York and 69th. (Some weeks we’ll stay later on Tuesday, till 6:00 p.m. and will not meet the next morning.)

READ: Prof. Reis describes the outcomes for students who took her class during the pandemic.