After reading Brewer Eberly’s great piece on the main site about virtue ethics and the Reformed tradition, I was delighted to find this reflection from him about teaching professionalism to medical students:
And yet, medical students may be disconnected from moral communities, disillusioned by moral traditions, or just have little time or direction to apprentice themselves to wise, virtuous professionals. Instead, they are left with contrived small-group discussions and online modules,, which they click through mindlessly (who can blame them) to learn the principles of professionalism without the practical wisdom and community formation necessary to make those tenets living, interesting, and active.
Just as “empathy” erodes into the vague moniker of “niceness,” professionalism risks dissolving into a series of platitudes that no medical student would likely deny but few know how to practically embody. The dilemma is one posed by Jonathan Imber, a sociologist of professionalism: “not whether the emperor has no clothes, but whether the clothes have no emperor.”
I wrote more about the original article here.