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Ruth Purtilo
Bioethicist in Residence
Dr. Ruth B. Purtilo is Director of the Ethics Initiative and Professor of Ethics at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, Massachusetts. She serves on the Ethics Leadership Group of the Partners Healthcare System.
Sustained research and commitments include ethical practices and policies related to disability and rehabilitation, conditions promoting social justice for marginalized groups, and moral courage. She considers herself a “translational” ethicist whose passion is to help integrate foundational ethics concepts and reasoning into everyday lives.
In 1979 Dr. Purtilo received a PhD degree in Religious Studies (focus on ethics) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1972 to1975 she attended Harvard Divinity School where she earned a Master of Theological Studies degree in ethics. During her graduate study she was a Joseph P Kennedy Fellow in Medical Ethics in the Harvard Interfaculty Program in Medical Ethics for four years. She holds a BS degree in Physical Therapy from the University of Minnesota and has practiced as a physical therapist clinician in the USA, Swaziland, Africa, and as a Project Hope volunteer in Colombia, South America.
She holds four honorary doctorates for her contributions to professional ethics. Among her recognitions, in 1983 she was awarded the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics by the American Federation for Clinical Research for her article predicting major medical ethical challenges that the new disease, AIDS, would pose. She was the 1991 recipient of the Harvard Divinity School Distinguished Alumni Award (The Katzenstein Award) for “her commitment to healing and persistence in championing the patient as a person”. In 2000 she received the McMillan Lectureship Award heralded as “the highest honor bestowed on a member of the American Physical Therapy Association”.
Dr. Purtilo’s clinical and teaching career is complemented with publications that reflect her commitment to the high ethical standards of care she believes should characterize the health care system, and to the considerations of justice that must inform practices and policies. She is the author or co-editor of eight books and more than 80 articles. Recent books are Ethical Foundations of Palliative Care for Alzheimer Disease: A US-European Dialogue (with Henk ten Have, eds., 2004, Johns Hopkins University Press) and Educating for Moral Action: A Sourcebook in Health and Rehabilitation Ethics, ed. (with C. Royeen and G. Jensen, 2005, FA Davis). She served as an area editor for the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Two books have become standard texts in a wide range of health professions education programs: Health Professional–Patient Interaction (7th edition with Amy Haddad, in press, Elsevier) is a study of respect in the professional-patient relationship. It earned a 2003 Jesuit Honor Society National Book award and has sold more than 200,000 copies; and Ethical Dimensions in the Health Professions, (4th edition, 2005, Elsevier).
Before being appointed to her present position, Dr. Purtilo served for 11 years as Director and Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Professor of Ethics, Creighton University Center for Health Policy and Ethics, Omaha, Nebraska. She has also held ethics positions as the Henry Knox Sherrill Professor of Medical Ethics at the MGH Institute of Health Professions and Ethicist-in-Residence at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts; Visiting Scholar in Medical Ethics at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden; Chairperson and Professor, Department of Medical Jurisprudence and Humanities, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha; and Assistant Professor of Community and Family Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Dr. Purtilo is a fellow of the Hastings Center. She is a past president of the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics and of the Society for Health and Human Values (now American Society for Bioethics and Humanities). She serves on the Harvard Divinity School Alumna/e Board Executive Committee. She was a member of the Ethics Working Group of the Clinton Health Care Task Force in 1993.
Dr. Purtilo and her husband, Vard Johnson, are co-directors of a non-profit organization they founded named “Fighting Chance for Children, Inc.”