The University of Chicago was founded in 1890 on the basis of values and beliefs that have guided the university to the present day. The visionary ideas were due in large part to the influence of its founding president, William Rainey Harper, and the unprecedented support of its founding benefactor, John D. Rockefeller [1]. If the University of Chicago no longer seems as radically innovative as it was at its inception , it is because its system of university structure and study implemented by Harper in 1890 has been so widely imitated across the United States [1]. Chicago was “built for a long future,” and its faculty and students are instilled with the commitment “to re-create that future for its successors” [1].

Those of us who have spent so much of our careers at the University of Chicago are well aware of the ongoing impact of the university’s longstanding cultural and intellectual ideals on students, residents, faculty, and deans. As described in John Boyer’s recently published history of the University of Chicago [1], the university’s cultural and intellectual milieu was powerfully shaped and conveyed in Harper’s original vision. One quality, namely his reverence for a “modern” scholarship that confronts facts courageously and thinks through complicated and controversial questions inductively, continues to be the gold standard by which our faculty and students measure themselves. As we consider Dr. Mark Siegler’s long and distinguished career on the campus of the University of Chicago and his impact on our school and our students, we are reminded of how aligned he is with the value system of the University of Chicago and how he himself has long served and continues to serve as one who has protected and sustained the University of Chicago’s “long future.” Over the 50-plus years that Mark has spent on the University of Chicago campus —as a medical student, internal medicine resident, chief resident, and faculty member—he has manifested the core values of this institution in his dedication to innovation and scholarship in clinical medical ethics, while also maintaining a deep commitment to teaching and to providing the highest quality of clinical care for his patients.

Shaped as he has been by the University of Chicago, Dr. Siegler has also served as an exemplar within the specific traditions and values that are fundamental to the history of medical education as it unfolded at this institution. The remarks made by Richard Richter, M.D., to the graduating class of 1967—Dr. Siegler’s class—and the alumni attending their reunion are very instructive in this regard. Dr. Richter, himself a 1925 graduate of the joint University of Chicago and Rush Medical School before the opening of Billings Hospital in 1927 allowed the medical school to consolidate both preclinical and clinical education on the University of Chicago campus [2], recounted the medical school’s history and its unique attributes. These include the geographic and intellectual integration of the basic and clinical sciences within the division of biological sciences, a completely full-time faculty relieved of “the relentless distractions and demands of private practice and free to devote their full energies to teaching or research, or both” [3], and the commitment that all patients seen at the clinics and hospitals of the university—not just charity hospitals—be part of the teaching and research enterprise. As Dr. Richter explained to the 1967 graduates, this clinical care and educational structure, which he described as a blend of the Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic models, offered unique advantages for the students and patients but, most importantly, shaped the faculty in profound ways. He stated, “To make it work successfully, the modern scientific clinician must lead a double life and function also as a skillful and humane doctor, able to attract and hold patients. He must even keep in mind that old bromide, the patient-physician relationship. For the patients come not to benefit medical science after all, but because they are sick and want to be helped” [3].

This review and description of the values and traditions which animated and shaped the university in general and medical education in specific provide a crucial context for Dr. Mark Siegler’s many contributions. As he has spent his entire career from medical school to the present at the University of Chicago, it is remarkable to appreciate the extent to which this university has molded and shaped Dr. Siegler as a teacher, physician, and scholar. In turn, it is no less true to say that Dr. Siegler’s impact and contribution to the institution’s “long future” has been no less formidable—as the “modern scientific clinician” whose work in establishing an academic clinical medical ethics program and consultation service and a clinical ethics fellowship program along with his commitment to the doctor-patient relationship has influenced the teaching and practice of clinical medicine on our campus and throughout the world.

Mark Siegler arrived in Chicago in 1963 as a young graduate of Princeton University. He joined the University of Chicago medical school class just days after meeting his future wife, Anna, on the University of Chicago’s campus, thus beginning two lifelong relationships formed in Hyde Park. Dr. Siegler is proud to affirm that during his 50-plus years at the University of Chicago, he has personally known all but 3 of the 19 deans of the biological sciences division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, including our medical school’s founding dean, Dr. Franklin McLean , whom Mark cared for as an internal medicine resident during Dr. McLean’s hospital admissions. Mark has always honored the traditions and histories of the University of Chicago as well as its thought leaders, even going so far as to find time to pay his respects to Lowell Coggeshall, the former dean of the biological sciences division from 1947 to 1960, during his 1967 honeymoon! Amusing as an anecdote, it nonetheless says something notable about Mark and his loyalty and admiration for the history and traditions of the University of Chicago.