Robert M. Sade

Robert M Sade, MD, is Distinguished University Professor of Surgery and Director of the Institute of Human Values in Health Care at the Medical University of South Carolina. In college his major interests were biology and philosophy. Leaving Wesleyan University, he studied medicine at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, then went to Boston for training in surgery at various Harvard teaching hospitals. When he finished his training in general surgery, he had a 2-year obligation to the US military, so in January 1969, the Navy sent him to Vietnam by way of 6 months in San Diego. It was the 5-hour flight from the Boston winter to the warm San Diego sunshine that persuaded him that winter need not entail suffering snow, sleet, and ice -- someday, he decided, he would move south.

Upon returning to Boston, he finished his tour in the Navy, completed his training in cardiothoracic surgery at the New England Deaconess and Peter Bent Brigham Hospitals, and concluded with training in pediatric cardiac surgery at the Children's Hospital, Boston. He served on the faculty at Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School before accepting an opportunity to move south in 1975, to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, to create South Carolina's pediatric cardiac surgery program. After nearly 20 years of building and maintaining the pediatric cardiac surgery program, he left the active practice of surgery to follow his second career interest that began in college, biomedical ethics, by creating the Institute of Human Values in Health Care at MUSC.

Over his careers in surgery and ethics Dr. Sade has written over 400 hundred articles, book chapters, and books on cardiothoracic surgery, medical education, biomedical ethics, and health policy. He was Medical Director of LifePoint, South Carolina's organ procurement organization, for 14 years from 1998-2012, and still has a major interest in organ donation and transplantation, especially ethical aspects of both.

Dr. Sade has been active in national organizations with ethics-related activities. He was a member of the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs for seven years, retiring as chair of the Council in 2007. He served on the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Standards and Ethics Committee for 14 years, retiring in 2012 after 6 years as chair of the Committee. Dr. Sade currently chairs the Ethics Committee of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, chairs the Cardiothoracic Ethics Forum, and serves as Associate Editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery.

While he has written extensively for journals and the lay press, The Ethics of Surgery: Conflicts and Controversies is his first full-length book in the field of biomedical ethics.