UI Health Care Rheumatologist Brittany Bettendorf, MD, MFA, said that, while growing up, her mom often told her that if she could write well, she could do anything well.
This advice shaped Bettendorf’s multidisciplinary undergraduate education at Northwestern University, where she earned degrees in neurobiology and poetry. Then, a chance encounter during her first week as a medical student at Wisconsin helped her see how each distinct field could impact the other.
“A conversation in a bathroom line changed my life, pretty much,” Bettendorf said. “I had on my Northwestern hoodie, and a woman behind me asked if I had gone there and what my majors were. It turns out that woman was Julie Uihlein, MA, one of the Bioethics and Humanities gurus at the Medical College of Wisconsin.”
Bettendorf said she is indebted to Uihlein and Arthur R. Derse, MD, JD, FACEP, Director of the institution’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, for their mentorship, which helped her integrate medical humanities into her career.
Bettendorf learned that ethics and humanities are not merely an adjunct to medicine but an essential part of its practice, a principle that has guided her career. In fact, it was the University of Iowa’s robust Bioethics and Humanities Program that led Bettendorf to accept a faculty position in the Division of Immunology. She established her roots in Iowa as both a physician and a writer, earning her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program—all while seeing patients, researching, and teaching medical students.
A different kind of fluency
That humanities integration now informs her clinical practice organically.
“My humanities background plays out in subtle ways in my daily life but has an essential role in my approach to clinical care,” she said. “I focus on humanistic care. It is geared toward each patient’s individual needs, background, and experiences. I believe my humanities background helps me be more attuned to that.”
Bettendorf is also attentive to the words clinicians use and the weight those choices carry.
“I am interested in how we communicate with and about our patients, the language we choose in clinical encounters, and how this can shape a patient’s response to treatment and the care they receive.”
Bettendorf’s interest in language grew into curriculum development. During her residency training, she designed a month-long elective in opinion editorial writing for her and her physician peers, capping it with a piece published in The Wall Street Journal.
The experience clarified her goal of teaching medical students to write for a general audience on behalf of their patients. Since arriving at UI, she has offered this editorial elective annually through the Bioethics and Humanities Program, with more than 70 students participating since 2018. Graduates have published work in KevinMD, Doximity, Iowa Family Physician, and The Des Moines Register.
“Whether or not they publish,” Bettendorf said, “I hope they take away the skill of advocating for their patient and that element of societal responsibility. We do have a responsibility to advocate for our patients and to make sure we’re helping them receive good care.”
Bettendorf’s elective is one thread in a much larger tapestry in the Carver College of Medicine.
A program for the whole physician
The Bioethics and Humanities Program promotes bioethics and humanities through teaching, research, scholarship, and service. Bettendorf describes it as sponsoring a range of offerings, including student electives, research opportunities, and discussions and conferences for healthcare professionals across various roles and disciplines. Overall, the program strives to integrate ethics and humanities throughout medical education, practice, and policy.
“It is a very expansive and interdisciplinary program that has a wide audience in the UI Health Care community,” Bettendorf said. “A lot of our focus is on providing learning experiences to medical students. We’re very interested in integrating our knowledge of the biological sciences with the moral state of things—with examining how we can be wise and virtuous clinicians and then trying to help foster that within our medical students and medical community at large.”
For medical students, there are multiple touchpoints with the Bioethics and Humanities Program throughout their four years of training. All students participate in the bioethics curriculum at the Carver College of Medicine, and those who want to dive deeper into this field can pursue the Ethics Summer Research Fellowship, the Personal-Professional Compass Program, or a range of electives. Each spring, the program sponsors an annual ethics conference for the broader community, as well as a monthly UIHC Ethics Rounds for discussion of ethical issues among clinicians.
Bettendorf emphasizes that the program draws on faculty from many departments and specialties. What unifies them, she says, is that they share the conviction that “ethics and humanities serve as a foundation by which they ground their clinical practice and day-to-day interactions.”
Connection as medicine
The commitment to human-first practice and the humanities runs throughout the Internal Medicine department, extending into the residency program, where the Humanities and Wellness Committee was developed. Residents created the committee in service of the same ideas that Bettendorf says ground faculty in the Bioethics and Humanities Program: that staying connected to yourself, your patients, and your colleagues is something the humanities can help make possible.
“The Humanities and Wellness Committee aims to foster non-work relationships in the department,” said Internal Medicine resident and committee co-chair Patrick Vosters, MD. “You experience a lot with colleagues in medicine but often lack an environment outside work to build these connections. The committee wants to create these environments.”
Those environments take many forms. The committee has organized intramural basketball and volleyball teams, a run club that rounds out routes with pancakes, and an annual pumpkin carving event and Valentine’s Day gathering. Quarterly “Death and Donuts” sessions, funded through a grant, give residents a safe space to process some of medicine’s more challenging realities.
Recently, one fellow hosted residents for a meal of brisket—a small gesture that this committee hopes to encourage.
On the humanities side, the committee runs an annual writing contest. The contest allows participants to tap into their creativity while providing another space to reflect on training experiences. Looking ahead, the committee aims to expand resources by creating an opt-out therapy model to normalize mental health care among residents.
Vosters sees the committee’s broader purpose as something more than morale-boosting.
“Medicine is one of those careers where the training is long,” he said. “You want to be intentional about how you’re using that time. If you don’t play it right, you could spend a lot of time and invest a lot of effort—most of your 20s—and not end up in a place that you’re happy with. The humanities help us establish our values and what drives us in medicine. That helps us understand where we want to end up and the type of physicians we want to be for our patients.”
He is equally direct about the role of peer relationships in residency. “Your biggest advocates are your buddies, right? Residency has many neat parts, but also tough ones. It’s important to have relationships with other residents so you can talk through challenges and growth—and make things fun along the way.”
Slow down, see more
Internal Medicine Resident and committee co-chair Aubri Larson, MD, describes leading the Humanities and Wellness Committee as a natural extension of personal hobbies, including plant biology, drawing, painting, and record collecting—activities that help her reconnect with herself and others.
For her, the committee reflects a conviction that has held true for her since before residency: that humanism is the whole point.
“Humanism and the humanities are so central to who I am, and I hope that emanates in how I care for patients and the people around me,” Larson said. “When we harness humanism, we’re able to really look in and know someone. I think that in medicine it’s easy to narrow in on things like—the sodium is 128! But I want to really know my patient. What home looks like for them. What their disease looks like for them. And taking the chance to just step back and hear what their bigger picture is.”
She adds that connecting with patients by spending time up front pays off later by reducing repeated interactions, ultimately improving care and well-being. “It’s shown to reduce burnout—but overall, it’s just my favorite part of medicine.”
What Bettendorf, Vosters, and Larson each describe from their own corners of the department is medicine practiced with the whole person in view: the patient, the physician, and the community around them. It is a way of working that can be taught, sustained, and passed on. The Bioethics and Humanities Program and the Humanities and Wellness Committee are two organizations that help make that precept a possibility here in Internal Medicine.
