Margaret E. Mohrmann, M.D., Ph.D.,
Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation
Professor of Biomedical Ethics
Professor of Pediatrics and Medical Education
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Director, Program of Biomedical Ethics, Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
434.924.5657
mem7e@virginia.edu
Dr. Mohrmann is a graduate of the College of Charleston (BS, 1969) and the Medical University of South Carolina (MD, 1973). After completing her residency in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospitals, she returned to MUSC, where she was director of the residency program in pediatrics, medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit, and taught ethics and clinical reasoning to first- and second-year medical students. In 1987, Dr. Mohrmann came to the University of Virginia as a doctoral student in religious ethics (and a part-time teacher and practitioner of primary care pediatrics), receiving her PhD in 1995.
She currently holds joint appointments at UVA in the School of Medicine and the College of Arts & Sciences (Department of Religious Studies). In the School of Medicine, Dr. Mohrmann directs the programs of teaching, clinical service, and research in biomedical ethics, as well as the Spirituality and Medicine Curriculum for medical students. Through the Department of Religious Studies, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of Christian ethics and in feminist thought, among other subjects, and the undergraduate bioethics internship seminar.
Dr. Mohrmann has received numerous teaching awards from medical students and residents, both at MUSC and at UVA, including the UVA School of Medicine Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the Raven Society (the oldest honorary service organization at UVA), and Omicron Delta Kappa. In 1988, the College of Charleston bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.
Based on her interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of ethics, religion, and medicine, Dr. Mohrmann is in demand nationally as a speaker to a variety of audiences, including physicians, medical students, nurses, theologians, chaplains, and lay persons. She is the author of Attending Children: A Doctor's Education (Georgetown, 2005) and Medicine As Ministry: Reflections on Suffering, Ethics, and Hope (Pilgrim Press, 1995), and co-editor of Pain Seeking Understanding: Suffering, Medicine, and Faith (Pilgrim Press, 1999). She is also the narrator of a video, "The Way We Die: Listening to the Terminally Ill," used widely by hospice and AIDS support groups and in college courses on cultural understandings of death. Recent publications include a chapter on the meaning and bioethical implications of human integrity, in Health and Human Flourishing: Religion, Medicine, and Moral Anthropology (Georgetown, 2006). In March, 2007, she was the inaugural Thelma Shobe Distinguished Lecturer on spirituality, medicine, and ethics at the University of California, San Francisco.