The McMaster curriculum: a critique.

It may seem odd to start presenting a new medical curriculum with quotations well over half a century old. But a close reading of the report of Abraham Flexner,2 on which most subsequent medical education was founded, does show that many of the principles that the new wave of medical education has developed were already clearly understood in 1910. It was the methods and administrative arrangements that developed in the decades after his report that seemed to confound the principles. It is a sobering thought for those of us who have been concerned with a new medical school. We have tried a fresh approach, an alternative to conventional methods, and in presenting the McMaster curriculum, I shall do my best to balance our achievements and our problems.