MEDICAL EDUCATION

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20893, 24 November 1937, Page 7

MEDICAL EDUCATION

EXAMINATIONS ATTACKED By Telegraph - Press Association AUCKLAND, November 22. Some of the freest criticism of the medical profession by one of Its own members that has been heard in Auckland for some time was uttered by Dr. F. J. Gwynne, a radiologist, in an address at the Auckland Rotary Club's luncheon. Dr. Gwynne. whose remarks were sprinkled with a good deal of humour, particularly attacked medical education and doctors’ hostility to the medical efforts of outsiders.

“The medical profession is changing in its attitude to its patients and to the community,” he said, "but in the transition it is difficult to keep adjustment abreast of change. A doctor should be the product of a perfect civilisation, and he needs your help.” Stating that he would try tc indicate why the system, and not individual doctors, deserved criticism, Dr. Gwynne said he did not wish to pose as a reformer. After six years in a medical school and the expenditure of at least £l5OO, a young doctor had not enough confidence to start In practice for himself, and usually embarked on a fouryear or five-year post-graduate course. At the end of that he was about 30 years old, with half his life gone, and still he was without practical experience.

Dr. Gwynne severely criticised compulsory set lectures by far too numerous narrow specialists who “raised tediousness to an exact science"; and a reliance on text-books with no study of the works of great physicians. Specialisation, he said, tended to overcrowd and overload the curriculum. Those who were responsible forgot that medicine was an art and that no amount of teaching would make it a science. Examinations were often justly suspected of being competitive, to let only a certain number through each year. They seemed designed to find out what a student did not know, rather than what he did know; and the candidate who was the best echo and Imitator of his teacher tended to do best.

“What is the result? A diploma bearing signatures to the illegibility of which is added the quiver of arteriosclerosis; a few technical tricks which we can teach to our secretaries in a few weeks, so that they can do our work; the loss of the critical faculty after a long period of absorbing uncorrelated material,” Dr. Gwynne said. In medicine, he went on, responsibility should be undertaken at a much earlier age. All through history the accent was on youth. Hertz, Rutherford, Davy, Galileo, Faraday, and many more had made great discoveries before the age of 30.