The Medical Clerkship

In the past 40 years, the teaching of clinical medicine has changed greatly, but so gradually that only a dwindling number of medical educators can recall from their own experience the character of the changes.Setting aside as much as possible value judgments based on nostalgia — a serious risk in this process — let us consider how learning clinical medicine has changed since the end of the last world war. Obviously, there is now far more to be learned — so much more that cutting-edge expertise is attainable only through narrower and deeper specialization. Not all cardiologists use coronary . . .