Medical Education : New Professorships in the Medical Department of Harvard University

Medical Education : New Professorships in the Medical Department of Harvard University

White, James C. (James Clarke), 1833-1916

Journals (periodicals)

Harvard Medical School

Boston Medical and Surgical Journal

The challenge to reform American medical education and bring it closer to the higher standards current in Europe started even before this editorial appeared in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. James C. White, a member of the faculty of the Medical School, decried educational standards, saying, “… if [a student] could pass a ridiculously easy examination … he got his degree of Doctor of Medicine. With this necessarily general groundwork of knowledge, and without any proper clinical or special training, he went out into the world, either to make himself by observation, reading and natural shrewdness the really excellent, practical family physician, such as nearly every village in America may boast of, or to remain through life a very ignorant and cheap doctor.”

White called for a general full year of medical instruction, an array of examinations, and an increase in the number of faculty members. Harvard, by incorporating the summer courses of the Tremont Street Medical School in 1858, had already provided for an increase in the length of the curriculum, had instituted more rigorous exams during the Civil War, and, as White announces in this article, had just created a chair in comparative anatomy and made assistant and adjunct appointments in physiology and surgery.

Excerpt from the The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, v. 74 (1866)

White, James C. (James Clarke), 1833-1916

1866

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Countway Library Bound Journals. Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, v. 74 (1866)

text

excerpt (1 page)

English

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DigID0002423

Purchased for the Harvard Medical Library, 1949