The Art of Medicine

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Posted on June 17, 2026 by

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Dr. Jeffery S. La Rochelle, the new dean of the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine, holds undergraduate degrees in both English, with a focus on Shakespeare and the Victorians, and microbiology. Before he entered medicine, he read as much classic literature as he could, knowing the demands of training and practice would eventually crowd it out. That choice reflects how he thinks about the profession itself. To La Rochelle, medicine has always belonged to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even when the field loses sight of that.

“We get enamored by the technology,” he says. “New MRIs, new ways of imaging. But what physicians are really doing is applying a humanity.”

He breaks that application down as “something in the mind, something in the hand, something in the heart.” Knowledge and skills, he says, can be taught in labs and classrooms. Influencing the heart is another matter. La Rochelle, a retired Air Force colonel with 25 years of service, was most recently an associate dean and professor of medicine at the University of Central Florida. He arrived at South on May 4.

He joins the University — already feeling like he belongs, he says — just as the College of Medicine readies for a move into a new, 295,000-square-foot building in spring 2027. The question of how to protect medicine’s human core in an AI-driven era is one he’s already thinking about carefully. Medicine rarely deals in black
and white. “We spend most of our time in the gray,” he says.

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