How to Fix the Premed Curriculum - Another Try

How to Fix the Premed Curriculum - Another Try

by Richard Ratzan 

Rich Ratzan is a retired ER physician from Hartford, Connecticut who was a classics major as an undergraduate.  He has taken Lewis Thomas' modest proposal to reform the premedical curriculum to heart and recently published an essay on this in the JAMA.  He writes:

"Forty-one years ago, physician-essayist Lewis Thomas proposed that applicants to medical school who were traditional premed science majors be considered last, if at all, for admission.  Instead, he wrote, preference should be given to students who concentrated on “some central, core discipline, universal within the curricula of all the colleges, which could be used for evaluating the free range of a student’s mind, his [sic] tenacity and resolve, his innate capacity for the understanding of human beings and his affection for the human condition."

Richard Ratzan's fine essay in the August 27, 2019 JAMA updates Thomas' classic NEJM article.
Download Jama_ratzan_2019_JAMA

Also see: Lewis Thomas, How to Fix the Medical Curriculum (NEJM 1978) It begins with this prescient paragraph:



Both of these essays are worth close reading.  Dr. Ratzan's JAMA piece has beautiful images depicting Achilles and Priam.

The Brygos Painter, Hector’s Ransom Skyphos,circa 490 BCE, clay pottery (h, 250 cm),