Mark Siegler, MD

2011

Dr. Mark Siegler has practiced and taught internal medicine for more than 50 years.

After graduating from Princeton University in 1963, he received his medical degree in 1967 from the University of Chicago. He was intern, resident, and chief resident in medicine at the University of Chicago, followed by a year of advanced training at the Hammersmith-Royal Postgraduate Hospital in London. In 1972, he joined the University of Chicago faculty, organizing and directing one of the early medical intensive care units. This experience with critically ill patients introduced him to a range of ethical problems that he continues to investigate, teach, and write about to the present time.

In 1984, the University of Chicago established the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, the first program in the nation devoted to studying “practical everyday issues in medicine.” In its first decade, the MacLean Center was chosen by U.S. News and World Report for three consecutive years as the leading medical ethics program in the country. Since then, the MacLean Center, under Siegler’s direction, has become the largest program in clinical ethics in the world, a program that now has an endowment of more than $20 million and includes five endowed university chairs in clinical ethics.

More than 280 physicians and other health professionals have trained at the MacLean Center, many of whom now direct ethics programs in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Dr. Siegler has published more than 200 journal articles, 50 book chapters and five books. His textbook, co-authored with Al Jonsen and William Winslade, “Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical Medicine,” 7th Edition (2010), has been translated into eight languages and is widely used by physicians and health professionals around the world.

Dr. Siegler’s research interests include the ethics of surgical innovation, living donor organ transplantation, end-of-life care, ethics consultation, and decision-making within the doctor-patient relationship. Siegler’s seminal 1981 paper, “Searching for Moral Certainty in Medicine: A Proposal for a New Model of the Doctor Patient Encounter,” was cited repeatedly by the President’s Commission in their 1983 report, “Making Health Care Decisions,” as the basis for recommending a shared decision-making approach for doctors and patients, an approach that has since become the standard model for the doctor-patient relationship in the U.S.

Dr. Siegler is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an elected member of the Association of American Physicians (AAP), and he recently completed serving on the board of trustees of Princeton University. For six years, Dr. Siegler served as chair of the ethics committee of the NIH-sponsored Immune Tolerance Network and has also served on the Ethics Committee of the American College of Physicians. He has been on the ethics committee of the American College of Surgeons for the past 18 years.