Customer Reviews

Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education

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This book is highly recommended to members of the academic medical profession and in particular those who sit on admission committees. As the author notes in the introduction, the reason for the book was to bring to the fore the fact that medical school was an educatiional process of learning to heal and not a technical training institute. This initial phase is critical for it must last a lifetime.

The fourteen chapters, some of which are previous articles, move from early days to the present. He comments and describes the education scene in early America, the role of the German system, the birth of modern academic medicine and its associated teaching hospital and some assorted ones on finance, state laws, and organized medicine.

The writting is relaxed and clear allowing the book to be read with pleasure and value. The facts are clearly presented in support of his story of the developement of American medical education, warts and all. There are some wonderful word pictures of early days when medical education was not what what we would like to think was in our past.

Hihgly recommended to all MD's but in particular to those with a concern for education and the selection of candidates.

I felt that this book started off strong describing the transformation of medical education from a mentorship during Civil War times to the proprietary schools of the Reconstruction Era and the birth of today's medical school in the Guilded Age.

The impact of the Flexner Report and the evolution of the philanthropic infusion into medicine is explained well.

However, I thought the book had a weak ending. It left me wondering if there wasn't much change in medical education over the past 60 years, since there's not much mention of developments in the latter half of the 20th century.