Physician Formation
Physician Formation: Integrating prayer, self-reflection, service, and education
The St. Ignatius Window at the Stritch School of Medicine. In the left panel, the medical school's namesake Samuel Cardinal Stritch is represented by his coat of arms. The center panel of the window connects St. Ignatius with the Jesuits, 樱花视频, and Stritch School of Medicine. The right panel represents buildings that have been central to Stritch's story through the years.
In follow-up to our recent story about the Physician’s Vocation Program, John Hardt, co-director of the program, shares his thoughts on the importance of the program and how it helps shape students' perspectives on faith and medicine.
What is your vision for Physician’s Vocation Program?
My vision for the program is one of threefold service insofar as it meant to serve students, the profession of medicine, and 樱花视频 and its Stritch School of Medicine.
Regarding students, the Physician’s Vocation Program offers a context in which a self-selecting cohort of medical students can form a community of learning, reading, conversation, and prayer. That community is at the service of their relationship to God and their formation as Christian physicians who understand their lives, their desires, and their talents as coming from God, directed toward the love of God through their vocation as physicians, and returning to God ultimately in eternity. Ignatian spirituality and its related themes of grace, freedom, discernment, and the surrender to and embrace of God’s love serve as conduits for creating and sustaining that community.
Regarding the profession of medicine, I hope that we serve the profession of medicine and its patients by forming physicians who are hope-filled, joyful, and loving physicians. I hope they serve as witnesses to kindness, commitment, consolation, and God’s love for the world through their practice as physicians.
Regarding 樱花视频 and the Stritch School of Medicine, I hope the program serves as an example of how we can take seriously the dynamic of faith and reason in professional education and formation.
What excites you most about having the program back after a two-year hiatus?
Most exciting is to be with students in-person again and engaged in thoughtful conversation. As a teacher, generally your deepest happiness is found in giving away and sharing any insight, knowledge, and wisdom you’ve gathered along the way. Like in all living, giving away that which is hard-earned and most precious to you is mysteriously and beautifully the most assured path to joy. It is very nice to be on the other side of the pandemic as we acclimate to COVID as a new dimension of our experience of health and illness and learn to be with one another again.
How do you see the program shaping students' perspectives on faith and medicine?
I think that students’ perspectives on God can be opened to new possibilities of understanding. Together, we work to appreciate the absolute mystery of God’s love for us individually and God’s presence in our lives. We strive to understand that God’s presence is often missed not because it is far away or hidden, but because it is all-enveloping.
Students’ perspectives on knowledge can be expanded insofar as our conversation, reading, and prayer engage ways of knowing that move beyond the empirical, scientific method that shapes so much of their lives as physicians-in-training. When the poet Emily Dickinson writes that “pain has an element of blank,” she is communicating a profound truth about the human experience of pain. That matters greatly to physicians who should know as intimately as possible the disorienting nature of pain in their patients’ lives. But Dickinson’s observation comes from a different way of knowing the world—it is both poetic and experiential. It cannot be studied and replicated in a laboratory.
Students’ perspectives on doctoring can be transformed through the program. Seen through the lens of Christian vocation, the practice of medicine reveals itself as a witness to God’s love for the world shared through this profession of healing and care. Through the practice of medicine, the physician is invited not only to embody the healing character of Christ as “divine physician” but also and, maybe more importantly, to see Christ in the patients for whom they care and the colleagues with whom they work. Our students walk hundreds upon hundreds of times over their four years with us under a quotation on the atrium wall in the medical school from Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus observes, “When I was sick you cared for me.” Part of the innate beauty of the healing professions is their consistent invitation to engage in loving one’s neighbor as a way of loving God.
Can you share a memorable moment from past cohorts that illustrates the program's impact?
For an assignment on habit and virtue formation, students were asked to make note of something concrete in the clinical environment that could serve as a signal for them to reorient their thinking to the question of what kind of person they want to be while they are being a doctor amid the pressures of training in the hospital setting.
A student returned the following week and reflected upon washing his hands before entering each patient room. He used that hand-washing time as a thirty-second reset before meeting a new patient. He likened it to the priest in the Catholic liturgy washing his hands at the altar before the consecration of the Eucharist and made this observation: “I made a habit while washing my hands of reminding myself that I was about to meet the body of Christ in that next hospital bed.”
I think medicine is better for having such a physician join its ranks.
John Hardt, PhD
Vice Dean, Professional Formation, Associate Professor, Bioethics
John Hardt is the co-director of the Physician's Vocation Program and teaches on virtue, character, and calling in medicine.
In follow-up to our recent story about the Physician’s Vocation Program, John Hardt, co-director of the program, shares his thoughts on the importance of the program and how it helps shape students' perspectives on faith and medicine.
What is your vision for Physician’s Vocation Program?
My vision for the program is one of threefold service insofar as it meant to serve students, the profession of medicine, and 樱花视频 and its Stritch School of Medicine.
Regarding students, the Physician’s Vocation Program offers a context in which a self-selecting cohort of medical students can form a community of learning, reading, conversation, and prayer. That community is at the service of their relationship to God and their formation as Christian physicians who understand their lives, their desires, and their talents as coming from God, directed toward the love of God through their vocation as physicians, and returning to God ultimately in eternity. Ignatian spirituality and its related themes of grace, freedom, discernment, and the surrender to and embrace of God’s love serve as conduits for creating and sustaining that community.
Regarding the profession of medicine, I hope that we serve the profession of medicine and its patients by forming physicians who are hope-filled, joyful, and loving physicians. I hope they serve as witnesses to kindness, commitment, consolation, and God’s love for the world through their practice as physicians.
Regarding 樱花视频 and the Stritch School of Medicine, I hope the program serves as an example of how we can take seriously the dynamic of faith and reason in professional education and formation.
What excites you most about having the program back after a two-year hiatus?
Most exciting is to be with students in-person again and engaged in thoughtful conversation. As a teacher, generally your deepest happiness is found in giving away and sharing any insight, knowledge, and wisdom you’ve gathered along the way. Like in all living, giving away that which is hard-earned and most precious to you is mysteriously and beautifully the most assured path to joy. It is very nice to be on the other side of the pandemic as we acclimate to COVID as a new dimension of our experience of health and illness and learn to be with one another again.
How do you see the program shaping students' perspectives on faith and medicine?
I think that students’ perspectives on God can be opened to new possibilities of understanding. Together, we work to appreciate the absolute mystery of God’s love for us individually and God’s presence in our lives. We strive to understand that God’s presence is often missed not because it is far away or hidden, but because it is all-enveloping.
Students’ perspectives on knowledge can be expanded insofar as our conversation, reading, and prayer engage ways of knowing that move beyond the empirical, scientific method that shapes so much of their lives as physicians-in-training. When the poet Emily Dickinson writes that “pain has an element of blank,” she is communicating a profound truth about the human experience of pain. That matters greatly to physicians who should know as intimately as possible the disorienting nature of pain in their patients’ lives. But Dickinson’s observation comes from a different way of knowing the world—it is both poetic and experiential. It cannot be studied and replicated in a laboratory.
Students’ perspectives on doctoring can be transformed through the program. Seen through the lens of Christian vocation, the practice of medicine reveals itself as a witness to God’s love for the world shared through this profession of healing and care. Through the practice of medicine, the physician is invited not only to embody the healing character of Christ as “divine physician” but also and, maybe more importantly, to see Christ in the patients for whom they care and the colleagues with whom they work. Our students walk hundreds upon hundreds of times over their four years with us under a quotation on the atrium wall in the medical school from Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus observes, “When I was sick you cared for me.” Part of the innate beauty of the healing professions is their consistent invitation to engage in loving one’s neighbor as a way of loving God.
Can you share a memorable moment from past cohorts that illustrates the program's impact?
For an assignment on habit and virtue formation, students were asked to make note of something concrete in the clinical environment that could serve as a signal for them to reorient their thinking to the question of what kind of person they want to be while they are being a doctor amid the pressures of training in the hospital setting.
A student returned the following week and reflected upon washing his hands before entering each patient room. He used that hand-washing time as a thirty-second reset before meeting a new patient. He likened it to the priest in the Catholic liturgy washing his hands at the altar before the consecration of the Eucharist and made this observation: “I made a habit while washing my hands of reminding myself that I was about to meet the body of Christ in that next hospital bed.”
I think medicine is better for having such a physician join its ranks.