Cultural Education of a Physician

Abstract

particularly the importance of general culture :To your professional knowledge you need to add general culture as wide and thorough as your special studies and labors will permit. You owe this to yourselves, to your brethren, to your calling. You owe it to yourselves ; for the man who confines himself to a single department, however noble it may be, sacrifices his own intellectual manhood ; moves, not in a self-returning circle, but in a constantly diminishing spiral, and from year to year becomes less, and not beautifully less.You have a vital interest in poetry, literature and art\p=m-\inall that is beautiful and grand in the works of God and man. You need them for recreation, solace, growth. You need them to bring you into due relation with the cultivated minds around you. You need them even for the highest professional success and reputation. No man can be great in his own profession who has not a vigorous intellectual life outside of it, beyond it, above it.Since the time when medicine began to evolve from mysticism into science, educators have been concerned by the possibility that the trend toward pure science would lose for the physician that art which made him a humanitarian. The search continues still somewhat aimlessly, for a test of character that will admit to medical schools or to medical practice only men of undoubted integrity, idealism and charitableness. As yet aptitude tests are in an "early experimental stage." Certainly there is as yet no method of determining the attributes of character or mentality that stamp the man who, on entrance into the study of medicine, will per¬ sist through the demands of the modern curriculum, now speeded and intensified. Scientists hint vaguely of the scientific type of mind, but they recognize it by its results and not by any established standards useful for measurement before the results are achieved.The educators have sought to aid the process of development of the ideal physician by attention to the premedical curriculum, hopefully attempting, by com¬ pulsory courses in English letters and composition, in language, in biology, even in sociology, philosophy, political economy, music appreciation, art and the drama, to implant the seeds of culture. The feeling persists that a cultural background is a necessity for the phy¬ sician.The report of the Commission on Graduate Medical Education,2 published in 1940, emphasizes the impor¬ tance of appreciation of those beauties and delights that are to be found only in cultural subjects. The report says:Medicine is one of the learned professions and this fact presupposes that each physician has acquired a broad cultural as well as scientific background and that because of this he is able to take his proper place in the community, both as a wise counselor to his patients and as an informed and active citizen. Too frequently the heavy schedule required in the college and medical school years, which becomes even more exacting during the internship and residency, and the large proportion of the practitioner's time that he ...