Current Criticisms of Medical Education

These are days of flux in matters pertaining to medical education. Commissions, foundations, societies, faculties and even legislatures are engaged in the investigation of the medical curriculums. We hear the old, familiar cry that “something is fundamentally wrong” in our current system; and the outsider, listening as an untutored observer unfamiliar with the history of science, may even begin to believe the old Latin proverb that there is more danger from the physician than from the disease. A generation or more ago, when bacteriology was beginning to evolve as a fruitful science and biochemistry became distinguishable from the elementary medical chemistry of an earlier day, when the way was being paved for the discovery of the roentgen ray and radium and when sanitation began to build on a securer foundation of scientifically demonstrable facts, there were vigorous pleas for the introduction of the laboratory methods of instruction into medicine and for the education of the student in the ways by which scientific discovery was proceeding at a rapid pace. The entrance of the specialist, uniquely equipped for specific tasks of diagnosis and therapy, was hailed as a sign of progress.