MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

[7] While most fellows are physicians, the center welcomes those interested in medical ethics from any perspective, including philosophy, theology, nursing, law, and the social sciences.

[citation needed] Since 1981, The MacLean Center has offered clinical ethics consultations to assist patients, families, physicians, nurses, and students.

MacLean Center fellows and faculty wrote many of the early papers guiding the field of clinical ethics consultation.

[8] This new procedure raised complex ethical questions about medical innovation, risk/benefit balancing, informed consent, and the protection of "living organ donors".

The MacLean Center worked for two years with transplant experts at the University of Chicago to review the ethical issues, publish protocols, and encourage professional discussion of the procedure before it was first performed on a patient.

In 1981, under the auspices of the MacLean Center, Mark Siegler and Richard Epstein organized a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar series on Bad Outcomes after Medical Intervention.

The success of that initial seminar program demonstrated that there was great interest at the University of Chicago in creating a sustainable interdisciplinary forum to discuss health-related subjects with colleagues from across campus.

Since 1981, the MacLean Center has sponsored an annual seminar series that has examined the ethical aspects of one key health related issue each year.

Edmund Pellegrino, Leon Kass, and James J. Smith, as well as by Dr. Sulmasy and Dr. Siegler, exists as a non-lending resource for faculty, fellows, and students working in the field of clinical medical ethics.

The library is currently working to digitize and catalog its collection of over 400 videos related to medical ethics that date back to the 1980.

The first recipient of the MacLean Center Prize was Dr. John Wennberg, the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor Emeritus for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School.