How to Fix the Premed Curriculum

Lewis Thomas,  New England Journal of Medicine, May 25, 1978

(This was written 40 years ago, and nothing has changed!)

PDF of How to Fix the Premedical Curriculum

  

Notes on article.
The influence of the modern medical school on liberal arts education in this country over the last decade has been baleful and malign, nothing less. The admission policies of the medical schools are at the root of the trouble. If something is not done quickly to change these policies all the joy of going to college will have been destroyed, not just for the growing majority of undergraduates who draw breath only to become doctors, but for everyone else, all the students and all the faculty as well.

Thomas states that the rhetoric of medical school catalogues is to major in non-science discipline as history, English and philosophy; even so, not many do. Pre-medical students didn't buy that line. [In 1978 they continued to concentrate on science. I don't see much difference today.]

The pre-medical students concentrate on science with a fury, and they live for grades. If there are courses in the humanities that can be taken without risk to class standing they will lineup for them, but they will not get into anything tough excepting science. The atmosphere of the liberal-arts college is being poisoned by pre-medical students. This is not the fault of the students. They behave as they do in the firm belief that if they behaved in any other way they won't get into a medical school.

Thomas suggests that any college maintaining offices for people called pre-medical advisers should be excluded from recognition by the medical schools.

Knowledge of literature and language ought to be the major test and the scariest. History should be tested with a rigor. Students should know that if they take summer work as volunteers in their local community hospitals, as ward aids or laboratory assistance, this activity will not necessarily be held against them, but neither will it help.

The first and most obvious beneficiaries of this new policy would be the college students themselves.  Society would be the ultimate beneficiary. We could then look forward to a generation of doctors who have learned as much as anyone can learn, in our colleges and universities, about how human beings have always lived out their lives.