Thomas R. Cole, PhD, Director

Thomas R. Cole is the McGovern Chair in Medical Humanities and Director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at the University  of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.  He is also a Visiting  Professor in Religious Studies at Rice University.  Cole graduated from Yale University (B.A. Philosophy, 1971), Wesleyan University (M.A., History, 1975) and the University of Rochester, (Ph.D., History, 1981).

Dr. Cole has published many articles and several books on the history of aging and humanistic gerontology.  His book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge University Press, 1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  He is senior editor of What Does It Mean to Grow Old?  (Duke, 1986), the Handbook of Humanities and Aging (Springer, 1992, 2nd edition 1999) and Voices and Visions: Toward a Critical Gerontology (Springer, 1993).  The New Yorker noted his co-edited Oxford Book of Aging as one of the most memorable books of 1995.   His most recent co-edited book is Practicing the Medical Humanities (2003).

Cole’s interest in the life stories of older people has taken him into biography and film-making.  In 1984, he encountered  a hospitalized psychiatric patient who claimed he was the “original Texas integration leader.”  Their collaboration  resulted in a book—No Color Is My Kind: the Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston (1997) – and an accompanying film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, broadcast nationally on over 60 PBS stations and internationally by the State Department.  The documentary received numerous awards and was nominated for a regional Emmy and a National Humanities Medal. 

Cole’s film, Still Life: The Humanity of Anatomy, was an official selection at the Doubletake Documentary Film festival in April 2002.  This work explores the special yet unstated relationship between medical students in the anatomy lab and the people who donate their bodies for dissection.  In 2001, Cole’s writing workshop program for elders was featured in the PBS documentary Life Stories.   In 2007, he co-produced Living with Stroke,  a prize-winning film about the invisible world of stroke survivors.

Cole’s is currently interested in the health and well-being of academic physicians and scientists.  As a historian and humanist, he views contemporary problems in faculty health as an outgrowth of the spiritual and economic crises facing academic medicine today.  He is senior editor of the forthcoming book,  Faculty Health in Academic Medicine: Physicians, Scientists and the Pressures of Success.    

Cole’s  work has been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Voice of America, PBS, and at the United Nations.  He serves as an advisor to the United Nations NGO Committee on Ageing, the Union for Reform Judaism and various editorial and foundation boards.  In 2004-2005, he served as a consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics project on aging, recently released in print as Taking Care.  He is currently writing a book on love in later life. 

See his most recent research and publications.

Contact information: thomas.cole@uth.tmc.edu