Medicine, Moral Formation, and the Recovery of Discourse

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 15, 2026 | Farr Curlin

[karpov]

In recent years, it has become something of a commonplace to say that American institutions are losing their sense of purpose. Universities, once understood as places for the disciplined pursuit of truth, now struggle to sustain genuine intellectual diversity. Professions that once carried an internal sense of vocation increasingly operate under external pressures—economic, bureaucratic, and ideological—that compete with their traditional ends.

Medicine is no exception. By many measures, modern medicine is more powerful than ever, yet both patients and practitioners sense something amiss. Patients often feel managed rather than cared for. Clinicians, for their part, report rising rates of burnout and moral distress. The language of “providers” and “delivery systems” has displaced older notions of the physician as healer. Within academic medicine, serious disagreement about foundational questions (What is medicine for? What does a good physician owe a patient?) is often muted rather than explored.

It is into this unsettled landscape that the Hippocratic Society has quietly emerged.

Founded in 2023 by a group of academic physicians, the Society is animated by a simple mission: to form and sustain clinicians in the practice and pursuit of good medicine. Behind that mission lies a more ambitious project, one that touches not only the future of medicine but also the possibility of renewing civil discourse within American universities.

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TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: doctors; medicine

[cymbeline]

Who controls how many doctors are produced, or whatever you want to call it? What about the expectations of patients? What about the high costs?