MEDICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19259, 25 August 1924, Page 7

MEDICAL TRAINING IN AMERICA.

EAPID UUrELOPMENT. DUNEDIN SURGEON’S iMPRBSSpQNS. . j Mr J Renfrew White, M.S., t’.R.C.S., of the Otago Me'dicol School, drived in Dunedin on Friday night alter «v mne months’ visit to the United States, where ho has been engaged in tee Study of surgery of medical and nursing education ana of hospital equipment and organisation. For three months he was a guest of fjji® ?***“ gical division of the Harvard Medical School, Boston. Subsequently he , steKhocl the methods of teaching of the undergfadunto medical schools of Columbia and Yale Universities, and at the post graduate medical school of the Univereity of Minnesota, the clinical portion of which is constituted by the Mayo Clinic, Rochester Mr White informed a Daily Times reporter that both medical and nursing education in America are in the process of great and rapid developments and changes, the most important of which are the result of a reference of their problems to general educational principles and to the substitution of sound teaching methods for soma of the tradilionad forms of medical teaching; Ixith of these developments are the result of the recognition of the fact that ■ technical medical and nursing education present not purely a professional, but also distinctly a pedagogical problem. Many cf these improvements and have been duo to the moot beneficent activities ’ of the Carnegie Institute for the Advancement of Teaching and of tee Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Education. Mr White also paid special attention to systems of maintaining hospital records and their use and place in medical research. The systems in use at such hospitals aa the Massachusetts General and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospitals, Boston, the Presbyterian Hospital, New York, and at the Mayo Clinic represent ideals attained as yet probably in no other hospitals outside America, 'ilie importance of such systems of records in relation to medical research can hardly bo over-estimated.