Student Testimonials

 

Why study Bioethics & Medical Humanities at Tulane? 

Earn your MS in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Tulane University and immerse yourself in a world-class education at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and the humanities. In this interdisciplinary program, you’ll engage with expert faculty and collaborate with peers who are shaping the future of healthcare, philosophy, history, law, and the arts.

Located in New Orleans—home to nationally recognized hospitals and unique healthcare challenges—Tulane provides a distinctive environment to explore critical issues like healthcare inequity and policy reform. This program will refine your critical thinking, deepen your understanding of the physician-patient relationship, and equip you to drive meaningful change in patient care and healthcare systems.

Hear from our graduates about how this program has transformed their careers—watch our testimonial videos today!

 

What Our Students Have to Say

Roxanne Daban, MD, MS

"I wanted to explore more of the art in medicine."

Klay Noto, MD, MS

"I felt we were having important conversations about medicine."

Nicke Worth, MD, MS

"It was an incredibly wonderful introduction to medical school."

Video Testimonials

Klay Noto, MD, MS - Testimonial

So, I was pretty undecided coming into the fourth year of medical school about what field I wanted to go into. The third year was really just me testing out everything. Um, I ended up really loving OB-GYN, and that's the field that I'll be pursuing. And, you know, knowing just what I know now about going into the field—obviously, there's, you know, good or bad—there's a lot of life and death. There are conversations about fetal and maternal mortality, which I feel really trained and ready to have...

Um, there are intimate conversations with patients about decision-making and reproductive justice that I feel like I'm also really well trained to address. Further than that, um, you know, just your everyday conversations with patients. I ask medical students if they've encountered an ethical dilemma in their medical training, and it's kind of interesting—the degree of people that will say yes versus no. And I think, for me, I really just recognize that any conversation with a patient is an ethical interaction. Whether that's if they can access their medications or, you know, the time that they took off of work to come in to see you.  

So I think, for me, it's just kind of seeing the ethics in everyday stuff in medicine. Um, but more so, just kind of the things that I'll be able to take care of specifically in OB-GYN.

Roxanne Daban, MD, MS - Testimonial

Bioethics and Film—it was an independent study that I did with Dr. Hansen, but he also has, um, he also has a class specifically for that where there's more people than just independent study...

But I also really, really loved, um, uh, Feminist Theory with, um, Dr. Holiday and Dr. Lazarus, um, and of course, Narrative Medicine with Dr. Montgomery. Those were some of my favorite classes, and I can't believe how many papers I had to write.

Um, you know, I came into this, I was like, "Oh no, got to write papers," but I actually enjoyed writing the papers because it allowed me to actually explore more. Um, and it's not like—it's not like those, "Oh gosh, I’m gonna have to write a paper," but you're actually excited to write these papers.

And, you know, at the end of it, I feel like now I have a lot of these ideas that I can keep exploring later on and hopefully write something about. Like, I really want to explore perfectionism in medicine later on and see if that's something I can write about.

Nicke Worth, MD, MS - Testimonial

I really enjoyed my Doctor as Author class. That one, I felt, challenged me in a different way. I was really inspired by a lot of the works that I read, and it really—I don't know—some of it’s brutally honest in a way that, you know, prior to medical school, we often glamorize, idealize, romanticize what medicine is, and that's not always the case. You know, really, it's not the case ever.

And just their experiences and what they did, the challenges they faced—so, for instance, there was a book called What the Eyes Don't See, which was about this pediatrician in Flint, Michigan, and how she came to realize that there was a serious lead problem, which led to all that drama in Flint, if some of you recall from a few years ago. And the unique hurdles and exposure that she faced in order to protect children.

You know, when you're studying the hard sciences, you can't learn what it takes to be that brave and what it takes to do what needs to be done—do what's right, not what's easy. And she was subjected to a lot of political criticism at the time, but she ended up being completely right. And she stuck by her guns, and she protected a lot of children in the process.

I've always loved stories, and I always wanted to be the hero of my own story. How can I be like these people—these, these, these giants—who are everyday people who went into this job and did something remarkable? And so, it's something I try to keep in the back of my mind, and it definitely influenced how I approached everything in medicine from then on.

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