Since the days of Sir William Osler, medical education has been done in much the same way by everyone everywhere. Doctors and academics slave away for hours and hours preparing lectures for students and trainees, all the while being locked away in their own isolated little silos. An anthropologist from Mars (to borrow an image from Temple Grandin made famous by Oliver Sacks) would find this remarkable. Could it really …
Osler said that exams were something of a menace to the true student of medicine:
“Perfect happiness for student and teacher will come with the abolition of examinations, which are stumbling blocks and rocks of offense in the pathway of the true student.”
— William Osler, from Aequanimitas, 3rd edition, 1932.
Perhaps this is because no examination can be passed by knowing the subject matter alone. One must also master the “hidden curriculum,” …
Wednesday, December 1st was World AIDS Day — a day to raise awareness for the ongoing AIDS pandemic around the world and to remember the past. As a trainee intern I spent 3 months in Zambia, a time that really opened my eyes up to what AIDS was doing to the world. Much has changed since then, antivirals have arrived in Zambia for instance, yet the disaster continues: 1 in …
In 1905 William Osler gave his farewell address as he prepared to leave Johns Hopkins for Oxford and England. After speaking to the assembled medical students about the tragic side of medicine he said:
The comedy, too, of life will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his patients. The humorous side is really …
Learn the art of observation.
“The whole art of medicine is in observation… but to educate the eye to see, the ear to hear and the finger to feel takes time, and to make a beginning, to start a man on the right path, is all that you can do.”
– Wiliam Osler
One of my favourite books as a medical student was Michael Zatouroff’s Physical Signs in General Medicine, a book brimming …
Treat the patient, not the disease.
Care more particularly for the individual patient than for the especial features of the disease.
— William Osler
We enter medical school eager to help the sick and the dying. Over the years this golden objective is transmuted into the base lead of disease-specific diagnostics and therapeutics. Our absorption in the strangeness of the manifestations of a remarkable pathophysiological process may distract us from its impact on …
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