A Pioneer in Bioethics

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If you’ve ever had to negotiate difficult conversations around the medical care of a loved one — withdrawing treatment for a terminally ill parent in favor of comfort care or struggling with what kinds of interventions to provide for a premature infant — then you may owe a debt of gratitude to Nancy Neveloff Dubler ’64, whose work as a bioethicist has helped countless people navigate these heart-wrenching decisions with humanity.

Dubler, who died on April 14, 2024, was an influential trailblazer in the field of bioethics. In 1978, she established the Bioethics Consultation Service — a team of lawyers, bioethicists, and philosophers on call — at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. One of the first of its kind, the service addressed complex issues of care with medical providers, families, and patients on the hospital floor. Dubler served as its director for 30 years.

“Nancy Dubler was a pioneer in bioethics,” says Nieca Goldberg ’79, clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “Her work incorporated a new dimension in healthcare, our ethical responsibility to incorporate the patient, family, and the physician in decisions around end-of-life care.”

Dubler’s calling to challenge the status quo started early. At Barnard, where she studied religion, she was elected president of the Student Government Association on a platform of dissolving said government — and followed through (although the SGA was eventually reinstated).

“She was very devoted to Barnard,” says her husband, Walter Dubler. The College “had been an oasis for her.”

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Dubler worked as an attorney and as an adjunct faculty member at Bank Street College of Education. In 1975, she joined Montefiore as director of the division of legal and ethical issues in healthcare and, two years later, became a lecturer in epidemiology and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In 1995, Nancy co-founded Montefiore’s Certificate Program in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities and was its director through 2008. This yearlong interdisciplinary program has trained more than 800 health and legal professionals from hospitals across the New York region and around the country.

“[Dubler] significantly advanced the field, not just in hospitals. She decided to be the voice for all the people we throw away in society, the disenfranchised and the unfriended,” says Warren Seigel, chair of bioethics at NYC Health + Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health, who trained at Dubler’s Montefiore bioethics program. “Nancy empowered us to be their voice — what would they want and what would they not want.”

During the AIDS epidemic, for example, Dubler urged doctors and trainees to enter patients’ rooms at a time of anxiety and fear — and advocated for the same care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dubler also served as a consultant for the New York City Health + Hospitals Corporation, where she coordinated the system’s clinical ethics consultants at hospitals and nursing homes. She maintained her willingness to dive into controversial topics, such as developing ethical procedures for stem cell research and issues relating to transgender adolescents. Dubler’s publications covered topics from the rights of patients to bioethics mediation; her 1992 book, Ethics on Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life-and-Death Choices, co-authored with David Nimmons, offered insights into how to think about, and resolve, these difficult decisions. After more than three decades of teaching at Einstein, she retired as professor emerita of family and social medicine.

Dubler was also known for her work incorporating mediation into bioethics consultation. Her book Bioethics Mediation, written with Carol Liebman, remains definitive. “Nancy was always practical and never theoretical,” says Seigel. “She showed us how mediation worked not just with families but how to do it in a hospital setting to do what’s right for the patient. That was her North Star. She will affect so many people’s lives in the future.”

In 2018, Dubler gave a talk at Columbia. She recalled starting out when there were few, if any, people of color studying bioethics. She smiled and gestured to the students and noted that while that has thankfully changed, differentials of power have remained. She told the students that the information and education they were receiving made them elite and privileged.

“We have the keys to the secret garden that patients and families don’t have,” she said. “It is in that differential of power, I would suggest to you, that bioethics can be [at its] most alert and aware.” 

Dubler is survived by her husband, Walter Dubler, whom she married in 1967, daughter Ariela Dubler, son Josh Dubler, and five grandchildren.