Considerations on Higher or Postgraduate Medical Studies

A far-sighted and comprehensive outlook upon the problems of higher or postgraduate medical studies is not less vital to the future of medicine at this juncture than is a sound and liberal regime of undergraduate medical education. In a recent article in the Jouirnal' I ventured to discuss what appeared to me essential defects in the methods and content of our undergraduate teaching, and in some of the schemes proposed for its improvement. The difficulties in respect of higher medical education, if somewhat different and less obvious, are nevertheless real and pressing, and their consideration is complicated by diversity of view as to what we are to include under the title of postgraduate education. Some attempt at definition is clearly necessary, but in the meantime, however we define their scope, higher medical studies present us with a current problem of the first importance. Whatever form the medical services in this country may ultimately take, they will make heavy demands on the services of consultants and specialists, and while the proper Government authority will doubtless enter with zest into the organizing of doctors within the framework of a medical service, the adequate training of those doctors for the diverse functions they will have to undertake within such a service, and the maintenance of professional standards, are responsibilities we dare not delegate if the service is to become in fact what it should be. That this task is recognized as ours finds a welcome confirmation in some remarks of the Prime Minister, recently made at a luncheon of the Royal College of Physicians (see Times, March 3), when he expressed the desire that there should be no lowering of consultant standards in the manning of the future medical services. In short, the intellectual traditions of medicine thus far rest in our hands, and their maintenance and enhancement are our responsibility. These, we shall have to remember, will go far beyond the immediate utilities of any national medical service. We may therefore proceed to consider the aims and methods of higher medical studies, and the nature of the institutions in which they may most fruitfully be pursued.