Thomas R. Cole, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus
Past Director, McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, UT McGovern Medical School

Email:  Thomas.Cole@uth.tmc.edu
Phone:  713-500-5972

As Director of the McGovern Center, I strive to build an educational unit that infuses ethics, professionalism, and humanism into the curriculum of  undergraduate medical students, and interns and residents, as well as students in nursing, dentistry, public health, biomedical science, and bioinformatics.   This educational work involves introducing students to materials in history, religious studies, ethics, literature, disability studies, and philosophy.  It requires that students think reflectively, consider their own  values and identities, and connect these to their education and clinical work.

McGovern Center Educational Programming

The Center’s unique programs include: 1) a Medical Humanities and Ethics Certificate for medical and dental students; 2) a Campus-Wide Ethics and Humanities Program that reaches students in all six schools at UTHealth; 3) the Sacred Vocation Program which immerses interns and residents in their own experience of medicine as a calling; 4) a postdoctoral research program that assists the career of postdocs in medical humanities and makes use of their expertise in medical education; and 5) a longitudinal focus on ethics and professionalism in the required curriculum that runs through all four years of medical school.

Past and Current Educational Activities

  • Founded, directed,and taught in a Ph.D., M.A. Program in Medical Humanities (UTMB, 1987-2003), the only Ph.D. Program in the U.S.
  • Creator, Executive Producer of Still Life: the Humanity of Anatomy (2001), a film used widely in American medical schools on the humanistic dimension of dissection
  • Collaboratively conceived, founded, and attained funding for the McGovern Center’s Medical Humanities and Ethics Certificate Program, also a scholarly concentration
  • Active small group leader (since 2004) in required 2nd year medical school class, “Introduction to Ethics and Professionalism”
  • Lecturer in 1st year required curriculum
  • Blue book teacher for medical school courses in “Climate Change, Health, and Professional Responsibility”
  • Senior author, with Nathan Carlin and Ronald Carson of the only textbook in its field, Medical Humanities: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • Olivia Banner, Nathan Carlin, Thomas Cole (eds.) Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)