The Montefiore-Einstein Certificate Program in Bioethics and Medical Humanities is the longest running bioethics educational program in the tri-state area. The year-long program consists of two courses — Bioethics and Medical Humanities I and II — which can be taken independently to earn the Certificate, or as core requirements for the Master of Science in Bioethics.  

Our multidisciplinary faculty collaborates with participants to offer an intellectually rich program grounded in our obligation to foster justice in the provision of care and the conduct of research. To that end, the curriculum introduces the foundations of bioethics as a field, key principles in moral theory, methods of legal and literary analysis, and approaches to applying the insights of bioethics in daily practice and research. 

Bioethics and Medical Humanities I and II run from September to May, spanning a full two-semester academic year. Each semester begins with an intensive full-day session and then proceeds with weekly seminars. The full-day session in the fall introduces bioethics dilemmas as they arise in practice and scholarship, as well as the key disciplinary approaches used to address them. Our spring full-day session, credited by many students with markedly changing the way they practice, teaches conflict mediation in the setting of bioethics.  

The weekly seminars meet during the semester for three hours, on Wednesdays from 4-7pm, at the Cardozo Law School building (5th Avenue and 12th Street). We tackle core issues such as end-of-life decision-making, reproductive technologies, research on human subjects, organ transplantation, and access to care for vulnerable populations -- each from the perspectives provided by varied disciplinary approaches. Our law professor guides us through a close reading of court cases, revealing how judicial decisions and legal reasoning shape clinical practice. Our expert in comparative literature leads us through works of fiction, finding there a lens to focus on issues of power in representation and the central place of narrative in medicine. We review state and national bioethics health policies with a faculty member who helped draft them. And throughout, the seminar format encourages lively discussion through rigorous analysis of texts and the writing of responses and research papers closely supervised by faculty.