Curricula that develop meta-skills will foster the acquisition and maintenance of professionalism. Adverse environmental conditions in the hidden curriculum may have powerful attritional effects.

The authors interviewed 46 eating‐disordered individuals with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM‐III‐R Personality Disorders (SCID‐II) to assess the prevalence of personality disorders in four eating disorder subtypes. The findings suggest that eating disorder subtypes vary in prevalence of concurrent personality disorder diagnoses. Obsessive‐compulsive personality disorder was common in restricting anorexics, but not bulimic anorexics. Normal‐weight bulimia was associated with histrionic personality disorder. Regardless of eating‐disorder subtype, self‐reported depression was highest in individuals meeting criteria for borderline and dependent personality disorder.

This essay argues for medical students' dissection of cadavers because this activity offers medical students opportunities to have certain experiences and reflect on them in ways facilitating their development of mature medical professionalism at the time they enter clinical practice. Issues central to professionalism as we envision it are (1) cognitive abilities identified as reflective judgment and principled ethical reasoning as they are exercised in four practice domains and (2) learning to learn in medical settings. We argue further that a key feature of such setting is practitioners' having to deal with ill-structured problems, and so we identify their features and relate their management to the sophisticated cognitive and learning abilities required of medical professionals.

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