Interview: Dean Arthur Rubenstein, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine A Curricular Face-Lift at Mount Sinai

by Jacob M. Appel

For years the faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine thought of their 33-year old institution as young, at least in relation to the 149-year old Mount Sinai Hospital. Arthur H. Rubinstein felt otherwise.

When he became Dean of the Medical School in 1997, he launched a program that transformed the Upper East Side institution from one of the city’s most traditional medical programs into one of the most innovative. He managed to harness faculty support for an overhaul of the curriculum and a revitalization of the school’s approach to medical education—an effort that has rejuvenated Mount Sinai to the youth it had already thought it possessed.

“This was a very good school when I arrived,” Rubinstein explains, “but a very traditional one. There were warm student-faculty relations and students had access to the board of trustees.” Yet only modest changes had been made in the curriculum. “Meanwhile, around the country medical schools were being changed,” he continues. “It was happening at Harvard and UCSF and a variety of smaller schools like Southern Illinois. I felt we needed that here as well.”

Rubinstein instituted a curriculum review to assess such challenges as the integration of basic science courses with clinical training, the role of electronic media in the classroom and the possibility of integrating interdisciplinary training. The faculty responded with changes that have since drastically reshaped the Mount Sinai student’s experience.

One of the Dean’s goals has been to emphasize the importance of the physician as a teacher. “Most members of the faculty are either here because they’re great clinicians or because they’re talented researchers,” he explains. “It has never been a high priority to hire great teachers. We assume naively that just because a man is a great cardiologist, for example, he’ll be a great educator. Many medical schools never bother to emphasize teaching, but I think it’s essential that we do.”

Rubinstein has set up a program under Associate Dean Patricia McCardle with the primary purpose of faculty development. “Most faculty are very eager for it,” he says. We’re received very positive feedback.”

Another focus of Rubinstein’s tenure has been upon the relationship between the medical school and the local community, particularly the working class neighborhoods of East Harlem that border the campus to the north. “From my point of view, the best an academic medical center can offer its students is interaction with a variety of patients so the students see as much of the society at large as possible. How can you understand HIV, wounds from violence or behaviorally sensitive conditions like diabetes if you do all of your training in a middle class or wealthy white community? We have a tradition of taking care of local people. That’s one of the real benefits, the real beauties of this place.”

How did such an innovative thinker come to his profession? By quite traditional methods, it seems. “My father came from Europe,” Rubinstein explains. “He always wanted to be a physician but he was only able to become a pharmacist. His whole life he told me what a wonderful profession medicine was. So when I came of age and started to wonder what I’d do with my life, he said, ‘I think you’re going to be a doctor, aren’t you?’ And I’ve never regretted that decision. Not once.”

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