For the first time in more than 40 years, a new Christian medical school granting MD degrees has opened its doors in the US.
A class of 50 students is finishing its inaugural school year now at Belmont University’s Thomas F. Frist, Jr. College of Medicine. That’s 50 future doctors who could be reinforcements for a workforce facing severe shortages.
“I call them the fabulous 50,” said Tanu Rana, a microbiologist and immunologist on the new faculty. “I love them dearly, and I’ve really enjoyed every second with them.”
It’s a diverse 50: The first class includes veterans, farm kids, and speakers of 24 different languages.
A new medical school in general is rare, let alone a Christian school. Belmont’s is the first MD-granting school of any kind to open in Tennessee in 50 years.
“It’s been extremely hard,” said Anderson Spickard, the school’s dean and a veteran internal medicine doctor. He came to the startup school from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he was a faculty member for 27 years. “There’s tension at every turn.”
Oral Roberts University, which opened a medical school in 1981, appears to be the most recent Christian MD-granting institution to open. It closed in 1990 under millions in debt.
Belmont’s medical school has a partnership with HCA Healthcare, a mammoth health system based in Nashville and founded by members of the Frist family, which could help the school have a firmer financial base. The school’s new facility, abutting the Belmont campus, is a $180 million columned edifice with labs, cozy study rooms, and a mock hospital ward for simulations.
Peter Huwe, who was teaching at Mercer University School of Medicine before joining the Belmont medical school faculty, said he had dreamed of being able to teach medicine from a Christian standpoint.
When he started looking into teaching at the Belmont medical school, “I could look around and see, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to work. They’ve got the pieces in place,’” he said. He is now a biochemistry professor at the school.
The school emphasizes servant leadership in doctors, a phrase faculty used several times in interviews, and whole person care.
Whole person care is a compassionate health care model for doctors to build relationships with patients and take social, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral factors into account in treatment. In education focused on whole person care, doctors learn to listen to patients and have empathetic conversations on difficult subjects—like terminal diagnoses.
Loma Linda University School of Medicine, a Christian medical school outside of Los Angeles, has for more than a century taught the “whole person care” model that Belmont is now undertaking.
More national medical organizations are recommending that US physicians, especially in primary care, shift toward that whole-person model. Another new, nonreligious medical school opening later this year will be focused on whole-person care.
Students entering medical school now are also more attuned to the whole-person approach, said Huwe, with their sensitivity to mental health and a person’s community context.
“It’s not as big of a leap for this cohort of students,” he said.
The cadaver lab at the school is unique in that it has an anteroom where students pause for 15 minutes of prayer and reflection before going in. “Fearfully and wonderfully made,” from Psalm 139:14, is printed on the wall outside.
While the school is open to anyone no matter their faith, the school’s leadership emphasizes that the school is rooted in Christ and his example. Faculty pray and have devotions together. They want to train doctors “having that humility to recognize that we’re broken,” said Huwe.
In the lobby of the main new building adjoining Belmont’s campus in Nashville hangs a seal for the new school. At its center is the Rod of Asclepius, a staff with a snake from Greek mythology that is associated with medicine. Spickard said that also references John 3:14, where Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” The verse refers to his death on the cross, which in turn references the story in Numbers 21:4–9 where sick Israelites who looked on a snake would live.
“The snakes remind us that we’re facing evil here—the machinery, if nothing else, of what’s making that patient sick,” said Spickard. “But if we look at the snake without the cross, we get overwhelmed to face evil on our own.”
On the seal, the staff is planted in water, referencing Psalm 1 (“like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season”). And leaves and fruit grow around the staff, representing Revelation 22, the tree of life with fruit for the “healing of the nations.”
“Christ said that he took evil down with him and buried evil once and for all,” said Spickard. It reminds him as a doctor that he’s not the hero bringing lifesaving care to everyone. “We’re planted in that stream of water.”
Until becoming a dean and hanging up his stethoscope, Spickard was one of the few modern-day doctors still doing house calls. That allowed him to do whole person care; he was often tending a patient in a bedroom, washing his hands in a family bathroom, sometimes walking into a house that the family hadn’t had time to clean.
He wants students to understand that house-call feeling: that entering patients’ lives is high stakes and vulnerable.
Spickard’s agreement to join the new school came at a time of personal vulnerability. He had just learned his son was dying of cancer; he was a dad in the ICU (intensive care unit) watching doctors he had trained over 27 years at Vanderbilt care for his son. It was a raw time to be contemplating a new medical school formed around whole person care and the example of Christ.
Shortly after his son’s death, his own dad died. Initially a faculty member, he was asked by the school’s board at that time to become the dean. He said yes but told them, “You have a wounded dean.”
“The chair of the board said, ‘That’s the best kind,’” said Spickard.
Then he stepped into all the challenges of a new medical school. A big hurdle is winning accreditation, which the Frist school did in 2023 from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the body that oversees all MD programs in the US.
Another challenge is that a standalone startup like the Frist school must find partner institutions for clinical rotations since Belmont does not have its own teaching hospital. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, for example, has Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where students rotate.
But the school’s partnership with HCA Healthcare means that students will do rotations at HCA-affiliated facilities in Nashville.
Already, the first-year students have also done rotations at Siloam Health, a longtime Christian nonprofit health clinic in Nashville that serves refugees, immigrants, and other low-income residents who are uninsured. The clinic has been doing whole person care for more than 30 years, and Vanderbilt medical students rotate there as well.
On the wall in the lobby at Siloam is printed the story of Jesus healing a blind man in John 9, where he tells the man to wash in the pool of Siloam and the man regains his sight. Back in the offices where doctors see patients are hanging quilted flags from all the patients’ countries, like Cameroon and the Dominican Republic.
The clinic’s leadership wants to show the students “we can do excellent, charitable whole person care. It does exist,” said Katie Richards, Siloam’s CEO.
The Frist school encourages students to work in rural health and global health and has a scholarship for those who intend to be rural physicians. Rana, the microbiologist, leads a global health elective at the school, through which students will visit Korea and India.
Some of the members of the first class are already planning to work in rural communities.
The medical school also has an unusual department: health systems science, which teaches students how to interact with systems of medicine so they can help patients figure out paying for care and navigating options—an essential skill if doctors want to help patients as whole people.
Whole person care teaches doctors to be good listeners of their patients, Spickard said, but doctors should also be “listeners” of the health care system.
“We don’t want you to think of the health care system as something you need to be vaccinated against, to go out and tolerate,” said Spickard about his students. “But be agents of hope within it.”
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