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$3.5 Million Gift Creates New Center
John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit will teach medicine as a calling and an art
John P. McGovern, M.D
“The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business: a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.”
Written almost a century ago by Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the “father” of American medicine, these words formed the core of his life and profession. Through both his practice and his teaching of medicine, Osler sought to merge medical science with human connection.
Today, this same “art” forms the vision behind the new John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Endowed with a $3.5 million commitment from the John P. McGovern Foundation, the new integrative teaching and learning center will be rooted in the holistic principles established and taught by Osler.
“The John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit will be a living, thriving tribute to Sir William Osler’s ideals, through which health science center students will learn to interact with patients on a deeper, more meaningful individual level – to see and understand the patient, not just the pathology,” said James T. Willerson, M.D., president of the UT Health Science Center.
Osler was a Canadian physician who pioneered the modern residency program and bedside teaching for medical students. Renowned for his compassion and ethics, he was devoted to teaching and practicing patient centered care.
“I wanted to do something with the UT Health Science Center that would further the principles of Oslerian medicine,” said John P. McGovern, M.D., president of the McGovern Foundation. “Through this center, health professionals will learn to focus on more than just the mechanics, to remember that medicine is a calling and an art whereby one must treat the whole person.”
The foundation’s gift is the largest commitment ever made to a program at the UT Medical School at Houston. It will endow and name the new center as well as establish the John P. McGovern, M.D., Chair for the center’s director, Thomas R. Cole, Ph.D.
“In an age when technology often replaces the touch of a doctor’s hand, the new McGovern Center is crucial to a complete curriculum that encompasses both the physical and spiritual sides of medicine,” said Stanley G. Schultz, M.D., dean of the UT Medical School.
“The McGovern Center highlights the importance of a forgotten area that is becoming re-energized and remembered,” Schultz said. “The McGovern Foundation’s generous gift emphasizes that this is important to the community, as well as to our doctors, our students and our patients.”
McGovern has been an important supporter of the UT Health Science Center and the Texas Medical Center. Through his foundation, he has established numerous endowments and teaching awards at institutions throughout Houston and across the nation, including 10 endowments at the health science center.
Thomas R. Cole, Ph.D.
A distinguished physician and founder-emeritus of the McGovern Allergy and Asthma Clinic in Houston, McGovern holds 17 professorships throughout the nation and has received 28 honorary degrees from major universities. He is the author or co-author of 252 publications, including 26 books.
McGovern received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University, where he first became acquainted with the life and teachings of Osler during his entrance interview with the Medical School’s founding dean, Wilburt C. Davison, M.D.
Davison encouraged him to read a collection of Osler’s essays, and so began McGovern’s life-long appreciation for Osler – and for Davison. McGovern went on to found the American Osler Society and has established several awards to honor physicians whose careers epitomize and perpetuate Osler’s values.
In 1997 he received the Maurice Hirsch Award for Philanthropy from the National Society of Fund Raising Executives, and in 2001 he received the Distinguished Citizen Award for exemplary “service above self ” from the Rotary Club of Houston.
McGovern’s service can be seen prominently in Houston, where his name graces countless community facilities and programs in the arts, education and health care.
This newest program to boast McGovern’s name will provide training to health science center students in medicine, nursing, public health, dentistry and the biomedical sciences.
According to Cole, the McGovern Center will build on a foundation of programs already underway at the health science center – programs in the medical humanities; health and the human spirit; and medicine, media and the arts.
For example, through a health and human spirit course, students work with families in the critical care and LifeFlight waiting rooms at Memorial Hermann Hospital, learning how to listen, deliver bad news, express compassion and maintain hope.
Through medicine and the arts, students can learn the “art of observation” by examining works of art at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
“The idea behind the center is that good teaching requires the whole person to reach out in an integrative way,” said Cole, who is author of the book The Journey of Life: The Cultural History of Aging in America and the film Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy. “What’s newer about the center is the emphasis on formation – on molding or shaping students to continue being compassionate, confident, integrated human beings.”
The center will collaborate with nearby institutions like the University of Houston, Texas Southern University, UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University. It also will offer workshops to help faculty members maintain and recover their inspiration in teaching, to help build a community of integrated learning at the health science center.
The McGovern gift, Cole said, will provide funding for hiring new faculty, generating new research and grants, and helping the center become financially stable.
In addition to Cole, the McGovern Center is led by associate directors Samuel E. Karff, D.H.L., adjunct professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and Stanley J. Reiser, M.D., Ph.D., the Griff T. Ross Professor of Humanities and Technology in Health Care, both at the medical school. Reiser also holds a faculty appointment in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Cole said he aims to create a center known for its excellence in research and teaching. “I want to bring the medical humanities as an interdisciplinary field to prominence here at the health science center,” he said. According to Schultz, this is a goal shared by the entire Medical School.
“Now, more than ever, we have an obligation as medical educators to intertwine technical training with human values, to teach students to employ the skills of both the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’ to help patients heal,” Schultz said.
— By Amber Buckley, Development