Month: August 2018

As a faculty member of the Boston University School of Medicine for over 30 years and current Associate Dean and Director of Admissions, Dr. Witzburg had heard his share of commencement speeches. However, most of those speeches were less-than-memorable. Even when Senator John Kerry came to speak, Dr. Witzburg could hardly recollect the content of his address. Thus, rather than telling the graduating BA-MD class of the BUSM, Dr. Witzburg posed a riddle for them to ponder: “Why am I here today?”

He goes on to ask each new MD to seek out the answer from within – not to look for help from teachers, mentors, or classmates. “Only you can discover your own uniquely personal answer to this riddle. Only you can dig down deep inside, where you keep your most treasured dreams, where you nurture your most lofty goals, where you drop your guard, look in your internal mirror, and face unafraid who you are and who you hope to be.”

Dr. Witzburg ends his speech with what it means to be a BUSM trained physician: “we advance our science with integrity and that we care for our patients with dignity, with compassion, and with respect simply because it is the right thing to do”.

“If you carry this with you into your future as physicians I am quite certain, that you will end your careers as I end mine – believing that you have done well by doing good, taking delight in the fact that you have never had an uninteresting day, nor gone home without having learned something new, and that your work has been, not a burden, but one of the greatest gifts of your life.”

Read the full speech in the Commencement Archive: https://www.themspress.org/journal/index.php/commencement/article/view/331

About Dr. Robert Witzburg

Dr. Witzburg is Professor of Medicine as well as Associate Dean and Director of Admissions at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM)—a position he has held since 2002. A 1973 graduate of Tufts University, Dr Witzburg received his M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine in 1977. He completed his internship, residency and chief residency in Medicine at Boston City Hospital, and is board certified in Internal Medicine and Geriatrics. Dr. Witzburg has served the Boston community as Training Program Director and Associate Chief of Medicine at Boston City Hospital for 12 years and then as Associate Chief Medical Officer at Boston Medical Center and as the first Medical Director of the Boston Medical Center HealthNet Plan. He was the first Chief of the Section of Community Medicine at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, serving in that capacity and as Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine from 1997-2002. Dr. Witzburg was also a founder, President, and Medical Director of the Neighborhood Health Plan, a community health center-based HMO focused on enhancing the quality and scope of health care services available to vulnerable populations.

This week’s commencement speech is by Mayor Mike Rawlings, who spoke to the UT Southwestern Medical School 2018 Commencement. Mike Rawlings is the 61st mayor of Dallas and the longest-serving mayor in more than 45 years. During his time in office, he has focused on spurring economic development in the long-overlooked southern portion of Dallas through his GrowSouth initiative, improving public education, combating poverty and domestic violence, developing parks, elevating the city’s international profile and turning Dallas into a top destination for artists, young professionals, families and corporations.

Mayor Mike Rawlings starts off his speech by talking about UT Southwestern’s importance to the city of Dallas and his personal interactions with the physician leaders of UTSW. He makes a plea to the graduates to stay in the Dallas metroplex to help the growing community continue to flourish.

Mr. Rawlings then talks about the recent events that shattered the Dallas community such as the police shootings during the Black Lives Matter protest in 2016 and the Ebola scare in 2014, and how it took the strength of heroic medical professions to get through these events. One such hero was UTSW’s very own trauma surgeon, Dr. Brain Williams: “…5 of our officers were ambushed and killed during a Black Lives Matter protest. I saw the best of medicine that night. One of the lead trauma surgeons treating our officers at Parkland was Dr. Brian Williams, a black man who lives in Dallas and in the wake of that awful day spoke powerfully about the fear that he has experienced as a black man interacting with police officers – but he added that he of course would never have allowed his personal feelings to in any way impact the way that he cared for those officers. That night he was a doctor first, an advocate second. But he used his platform as a trauma surgeon who had worked to save our officers as an opportunity to speak in a raw and honest way about social justice… and that has continued in the years since the July 7 shootings.”

Mayor Rawlings then goes into a conversation about the importance of the personal interactions the graduating students will encounter throughout their professional medical careers, and draws from the work and thoughts of Martin Buber, a Jewish Theologian. He encourages the graduates to change their personal interactions from an “I – IT relationship” to an” I – THOU relationship” to recognize the divinity within ourselves and the divinity of others so that deeper relationships can be formed.

Mike Rawlings concludes his speech with a call to action for the graduates to realize their higher calling in life: “These are all personal choices each of you will have to make. Will you fulfill your calling? If so, what will it be? And how will you interact with your patients? Can you be conveyors of science and hope at the same time? I know you will make the right decisions. You are smart enough, you’ve been taught by the best, and you are lucky. I’m betting on you. And so is our city. Thank you for allowing me to celebrate this day with you.”

Read the full speech in the Commencement Archive: https://www.themspress.org/journal/index.php/commencement/article/view/327

To start this year’s commencement archive, we have Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan’s 2018 commencement speech at Yale School of Medicine titled “The Social Mission of Medical Education”.

Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan is Professor of Health Policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington and Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He served 23 years in the United States Public Health Service, starting as a physician in the National Health Service Corps and later as director of the program. He subsequently, directed the Bureau of Health Professions, and attained the rank of Assistant Surgeon General. In 1996, he retired from the Public Health Service and joined the staff of the journal Health Affairs as a Contributing Editor and the Founding Editor of the Narrative Matters section. He joined the faculty at George Washington University on a part time basis in 1997 and full time in 2005. In recent years, his research and policy work have focused on US and international health workforce issues, especially equity in health professions education.

In his address to the Yale School of Medicine graduating class, Dr. Mullan tells a story about his experiences as a medical civil rights worker in the mid 1960’s right after his first year of medical school. He lived with the locals to help sort out local health problems and promote civil rights work by going door-to-door to encourage people to register to vote and sign their kids up to attend the white school that was going to be integrated for the upcoming year. His experiences along with the Civil Rights Movement sweeping the nation inspired him to become a Civil Rights doctor, a doctor for those who were underrepresented. He went back to the University of Chicago for medical school and helped organize student clubs and events focused on Civil Rights. The work of his peers and him was both on a local and national scale.

Dr. Mullan then asks the students of the graduating class to think about why they chose medicine as a career. In his works “Medicine, we know, will guarantee us a good living. But, for many of us, the selection of medicine goes way beyond that. Idealism draws many of us into medicine – the opportunity of helping others, alleviating pain, extending life, and perhaps contributing new knowledge to the healing arts. For others there is something more – a sense of what I will call social mission that is more than the desire to heal. Social mission recognizes that there are inequities in the world and, more to the point, in access to health and health care. In ways articulate and inarticulate, many young men and women entering medicine hope to help in this regard. They hope to make the world not only a better place, but also a fairer place. This is social mission.”

Dr. Mullan details the need for medical schools to have social missions in order to shape the doctors of the future. Dr. Mullan exclaims that “We need doctors who understand these problems and are committed to fixing them. The call for social mission is by no means limited to primary care or for those who see themselves as activists. We need physicians of all specialties to work in rural areas and to treat poor and low-income populations. We need physician research scientists and policy leaders equipped to tackle these equity problems”.

Dr. Mullan concludes with a statement that the whole medical system – medical schools and teaching hospitals – needs to be rebuilt to not only be better but fairer.

Read the full speech in the Commencement Archive: https://www.themspress.org/journal/index.php/commencement/article/view/326