The rapid rate of scientific, technological, legal, and cultural change in today’s world makes a broad education in bioethics and medical humanities more desirable than ever.

The Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Louisville is a professional degree intended to provide graduates with an enriched ethical knowledge base, preparing them to work in clinical or hospital settings, and to undertake scholarly research or teach in the field of bioethics and medical humanities.

The program will enhance graduates’ contextual experience within their primary professional field, for example, law, philosophy, medicine, nursing, dentistry, religious studies, public health, health administration, or veterinary medicine. Degree holders may participate in hospital ethics committees, teach medical ethics and humanities, understand the interaction of religion/spirituality and medicine, or be equipped to interpret issues in bioethics to the general public and the media.

Those students entering the program with a theoretical base will gain the tools to apply theory to real-world problems. Those entering with hands-on experience will gain the theoretical underpinnings for careful analysis of real-world problems.

Core courses will be drawn from philosophy and medicine, with electives available from the Schools of Law, Medicine, Public Health and Information Sciences, and Social Work, as well as the Arts & Sciences departments of History, Pan-African Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies. This breadth offers students a significant degree of flexibility to pursue their personal areas of interest and broaden their expertise beyond their core knowledge base.