How To Fix The Pre-medical Curriculum

Forty years ago, in 1978, Lewis Thomas, M.D., then president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, wrote an important essay for the New England Journal of Medicine.  As one of the top medical educators in the country, he words should have carried some weight.  Strangely, nothing appears to have changed in the past two score years, maybe it is even worse today.  

This Op-Ed piece deserves to be reread today.  It begins:

"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 that growing majority of undergraduate students who draw breath only to become doctors, but for everyone else, all the students, and all the faculty as well."

For the article in full:  Download L. Thomas Pre-medical Curriculum