Admissions II

What kind of criteria should medical schools use for admissions? I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced the current system makes sense. Dr. Lewis Thomas (1913-1993), a physician-essayist who served as Dean of Yale Medical School, Dean of New York University School of Medicine, and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute wrote a fascinating essay in his collection Medusa and the Snail on premedical training. He claimed that if admissions policies to medical school are not changed, "all the joy of going to college will have been destroyed." He is a proponent of the broadly educated liberal arts curriculum: history, literature, English, philosophy, art, political science. I love his essay; here is an excerpt:

"There is still some talk in medical deans' offices about the need for general culture, but nobody really means it, and certainly the premedical students don't believe it. They concentrate on science.

They concentrate on science with a fury, and they live for grades. [...] The atmosphere of the liberal-arts college is being poisoned by premedical students. It is not the fault of the students, who do not start out as a necessarily bad lot. They behave as they do in the firm belief that if they behave any otherwise they won't get into medical school.

[There ought to be] some central, core discipline, universal within the curricula of all the colleges, which could be used for evaluating the free range of a student's mind, his tenacity and resolve, his innate capacity for the understanding of human beings, and his affection for the human condition. For this purpose, I propose that classical Greek be restored as the centerpiece of undergraduate education. The loss of Homeric and Attic Greek from American college life was one of this century's disasters. Putting it back where it once was would quickly make up for the dispiriting impact which generations of spotty Greek in translation have inflicted on modern thought. The capacity to read Homer's language closely enough to sense the terrifying poetry in some of the lines could serve as a shrewd test for the qualities of mind and character needed in a physician."