Medical Students Just Aren't the Same These Days

When I read history of medicine, I'm astonished by what people did. Medical students have made amazing discoveries. Of course back then, curricula weren't structured, and there was time and passion to pursue research, but what people accomplished is simply remarkable. In 1921, Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod isolated the compound insulin, for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1923. However, often unrecognized is Charles Best, a fourth year medical student and a chemist J.B. Collip who probably did all the grunt work. In 1916, Jay McLean was a second year medical student at Johns Hopkins who isolated the compound heparin. It stuns me to think of the impact of these discoveries in the last century of medicine. I know medical students who have participated in impressive projects, but the past was a totally different era of research and discovery.