Twenty-five academic years ago, in the spring of 1978, the Dean of the Medical School, William Laupus, hired me to begin the humanities program and serve as its founding chair. The Department of Medical Humanities, first a section of the Department of Pediatrics, became a freestanding program in 1982. Two years later, the humanities program became an official department within the Brody School of Medicine. In 1995, the Department launched the Bioethics Center under a grant from University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina. Since the formation of the humanities program in the Brody School of Medicine in 1978, we have had nine faculty, six of whom are still members of our department: John Davis, Kenneth De Ville, John Moskop, David Resnik, Todd Savitt and myself. The other three, Jeff Kahn, Willem Landman and Reidar Lie left to head other medical humanities programs.

To celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary we have asked all past and present faculty members to make research presentations for our Perspective Lecture Series. On August 19th, Willem Landman spoke on “Delivering First-World Health Care to a Third-World Country: Medical Ethics in South Africa after Apartheid.” Landman will be visiting from South Africa, where he heads the Ethics Institute of South Africa. On August 23rd, Reidar Lie, who is on leave from the Philosophy Department at the University of Bergen and currently at The National Institutes of Health Center for Bioethics, discussed “Fair Process and Resource Allocation in Health Care: A Comparison Between the UK and Thailand.” On September 10th, Jeffrey Kahn, Director of The Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota, will make a presentation about “ The Ethics of Conceiving a Stem Cell Donor.” The current department’s faculty will make presentations later in the 2002-2003 academic year.

In the last twenty-five years the six current faculty have published sixteen monographs and edited books:

Adil Shamoo and David B. Resnik, Responsible Conduct of Research, 2002, Oxford, New York.

Todd L. Savitt, Medical Reader’s Theater: A Guide and Scripts, 2002, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Loretta M. Kopelman and Kenneth A. De Ville, Physician-Assisted Suicide: What are the Issues? 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Loretta M. Kopelman, Building Bioethics: Conversations with Clouser and Friends, 1999, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Todd L. Savitt, Fevers, Agues, and Cures: Medical Life in Old Virginia, 1999,The Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.

David B. Resnik, The Ethics of Science: An Introduction, 1998, Routledge, New York.

Kenneth A. De Ville, Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-Century America, 1990, New York University Press, New York.

Loretta M. Kopelman and John C. Moskop, Children and Healthcare: Moral and Social Issues, 1989, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, Science and Medicine in the Old South, 1989, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.

Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, 1988, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.

John C. Moskop and Loretta M. Kopelman, Ethics and Critical Care Medicine, 1985, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

David B. Resnik, Holly B. Steinkraus, Pamela J. Langer, Human Germline Gene Therapy: Scientific, Moral, and Political Issues, 1999, R.G. Landes Company, Austin.

Martin Kaufman, Stuart Galishoff, Todd L. Savitt, Dictionary of American Medical Biography (Volumes 1 and 2), 1984, Greenwood Press, Westport.

John C. Moskop, Divine Omniscience and Human Freedom, 1984, Mercer University Press, Macon.

Loretta M. Kopelman and John C. Moskop, Ethics and Mental Retardation, 1984, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia, 1981, University of Illinois Press, Chicago.

I want to thank my Medical Humanities colleagues for making our program succeed for twenty-five years as a result of their excellence in teaching and research, and their outstanding service to the university and community. I also want to thank the 130 basic science and clinical faculty members who have team-taught with us over the years, and our adjunct faculty Greg Hassler and Harry Cain. In addition, I would like to thank a series of visiting professors staying for one or more semesters, who have enriched our programs: Norman Dahl, S. Van McCrary, Carl Elliott, Robert Holmes, Suzanne Poirier, Anton van Niekerk, and Joel Shuman. The members of the Department of Medical Humanities hope that you can join us in some part of our celebration of this occasion.