K. Danner Clouser died on Monday August 14, 2000 following a courageous five-year struggle against pancreatic cancer. He was Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, having retired four years ago. Dr. Clouser graduated magna cum laude in 1952 from Gettysburg College where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating from Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, PA in 1955, he received his MA (1958) and Ph.D (1961) from Harvard University in philosophy. He taught philosophy at Dartmouth and Carleton Colleges, and then joined the faculty of the Penn State College of Medicine in 1968. He was the first philosopher to receive a full-time faculty position in a medical school and he helped to establish the first department of humanities within a medical school. One of his major interests was to set the disciplines of medical ethics and medical humanities on a rigorous footing and he advised many colleges and medical schools about initiating programs in the humanities, bioethics and medical ethics.

Dan collected many awards in his illustrious career. In 1978, Gettysburg College honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award. He received the Annual Award of the Society for Health and Human Values in 1988. During the 1986-1988 academic years he obtained a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship. He also received honorary doctoral degrees from Jefferson University and his alma matter, Gettysburg College. Clouser received the Henry Knowles Beecher Award in 1996 from The Hastings Center for lifetime contributions to ethics and the life sciences.

Dan stood out not only for his scholarship and teaching, but also for his collegiality, his infectious humor, and his gifts as a speaker. He was a frequent lecturer at universities, hospitals, medical schools and conferences and served on many ethics committees and state and national task forces, including the NIH Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel and the NIH National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. He remained active until a few days before his death, continuing to write and give talks. He was a Founding Fellow of The Hastings Center and a charter member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. He was an Associate Editor of the original four-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (1978) and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement (1996). His most recent major work on bioethics (co-authored with Bernard Gert and Charles Culver) was finished after the onset of his last illness. It is entitled Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals (Oxford, 1997).

Dan had an extremely important role in shaping the teaching and scholarship in medical ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of education. Last year a festschrift to K. Danner Clouser was published entitled Building Bioethics: Conversations with Clouser and friends on Medical Ethics (Kluwer, 1999). The contributors were his friends and colleagues: Tom L. Beauchamp, Dan Callahan, Bernard Gert, Nancy Dubler, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Loretta M. Kopelman, Laurence B. McCullough, John C. Moskop, and Robert Veatch. Like Clouser, they had committed their professional activities to a blossoming new field variously described as applied ethics, medical ethics, philosophy and medicine, bioethics, or medical humanities. Dan expressed the wish that contributors offer critical reviews of his work and then he be permitted the opportunity to respond to each of them. He did so over the course of a year and a half despite the fact that when the project began three years ago, he was already very ill.

Dan’s powerful intellect and warm friendship will be sorely missed by his many colleagues and friends. Survivors include his wife Mary Louise (Morganthal); son Charles Alexander of New Orleans, LA; daughter Mary Danner Pomeroy and two granddaughters of Laurel, DE; sister Sara Clouser Oates of Wexford, PA, and seven nieces and nephews. A brother, Paul, predeceased him.

Loretta M. Kopelman
Brody School of Medicine
East Carolina University