Mark Siegler, MD, MACP

In June of 2024, Mark Siegler, MD, MACP retired from the faculty of the University of Chicago. Dr. Siegler has been a pivotal figure in the development of clinical medical ethics as an essential part of the practice of medicine. Dr. Siegler served as the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Surgery for many years and was the founding Director of what came to be the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, a position that he held for 38 years.

Dr. Siegler not only established the clinical medical ethics field, he made the University of Chicago the world’s leader in the medical specialty. Clinical medical ethics was born at UChicago Medicine in 1972, while Dr. Siegler was directing the hospital’s first Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU). While treating the hospital’s sickest patients, he identified a number of questions and ethical issues for which there was nowhere to turn for answers. Things like, do you tell a patient’s family the truth about their loved one’s condition? Or, when there are a limited number of beds available in the MICU, who gets a bed? The sickest person, who has little chance of survival? Or a less sick person with a higher chance of survival?

One evening in 1972, while Siegler and some of the MICU team were relaxing at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, his residents and students informed him that they always tell a MICU patient’s family that their loved one was going to die. This stunned and upset Siegler, but his coworkers argued that it prepared the family for the worst, took pressure off the doctors, and made them look like heroes if the patient survived. Siegler was immediately troubled by what he had learned, and started to do research on such topics.

“What drew me into this was the importance of ethics in the day-to-day practice of medicine,” Dr. Siegler said. “It’s not just about the occasional, complicated case. I think the field applies to every patient we see, inpatient or outpatient.”

A few years later, in 1975, Dr. Siegler published his first paper on clinical ethics in the New England Journal of Medicine, titled “Pascal’s Wager and the Hanging of the Crepe.” The title references the wager over whether God exists. The “hanging of the crepe” is a ritual meaning someone was going to die. He would go on to write over 300 other journal articles and book chapters, plus five books on the topic of clinical ethics. The 1982 textbook he co-authored with Albert Jonsen and William Winslade, “Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical Medicine,” is in its 9th edition, and has been translated into 11 languages.

“The field of clinical medical ethics continues to be vitally important,” Siegler said. “It’s contributed to better patient care, to shared decision-making and to better doctor-patient relationships.”

Thanks to multi-million dollar donations from the MacLean Family, Siegler established the MacLean Center. Since its creation in 1984, the center has trained more than 500 fellows in clinical ethics. Many of these fellows now lead clinical ethics programs at hospitals and universities around the world.

The MacLean Center offers an annual conference, a year-long lecture series, and a number of clinical ethics fellowship training opportunities. “The Fellowship training established by the MacLean Center has had a greater impact than any other clinical ethics program in the world,” states the wording on Johns Hopkins University’s Harvey M. Meyerhoff Leadership in Bioethics Award, which Dr. Siegler previously received. He has also received the ASBH Lifetime Achievement Award, the University of Chicago’s Norman Maclean Faculty Award from the Alumni Board, and the University of Chicago’s Gold Key Award in recognition of outstanding service to the Division of the Biological Sciences and to the University of Chicago.