Training Young Doctors: The Current Crisis
Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine
by Kenneth M. Ludmerer
Oxford University Press, 431 pp., $34.95
In the 1890s, Sir William Osler, now regarded as something of a demigod in American medicine, created at the Johns Hopkins Hospital a novel system for training physicians after graduation from medical school. It required young physicians to reside in the hospital full-time without pay, sometimes for years, to learn how to care for patients under the close supervision of senior physicians.
This was the first residency program. Despite the monastic existence, the long hours, and the rigid hierarchy, Osler’s residents apparently loved it. They felt exalted to be able to learn the practice of medicine under the tutelage of great physicians who based their teachings on science, inquiry, and argument, not tradition. And far from bridling at being at the bottom of the pyramid, they virtually worshiped their teachers, who in turn generally lavished great attention and affection on their charges. Osler’s innovation spread rapidly, and the residency system is still the essential feature of teaching hospitals throughout the country.
Residents are young doctors who have completed medical school and are learning their chosen specialty by caring for patients under the supervision of senior physicians, called attendings. Residents in their first year are called interns. As in Osler’s time, residents work long hours, although they no longer live in the hospital and are now paid a modest salary. The time this training takes varies—three years, for example, to complete a program in internal medicine. Following that, many go on to a few more years of training in subspecialties (for example cardiology, a subspecialty of internal medicine), and at this point they are called fellows.
Together residents and fellows, who now number about 120,000 across the country, are called house officers, and their training is termed graduate medical education (GME). The teaching hospitals where most of this takes place are often affiliated with medical schools, which in turn are often part of universities, and together they make up sometimes gigantic conglomerates, called academic medical centers.
Despite the fact that Osler’s idea lives on, there have been enormous changes over the years, and this is the subject of Kenneth Ludmerer’s meticulous new book, Let Me Heal. Ludmerer, a senior faculty physician and professor of the history of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, sounds a warning. The Oslerian ideal of faculty and residents forming close relationships and thinking together about each patient is in trouble. Instead, residents, with little supervision, are struggling to keep up with staggering workloads, and have little time or energy left for learning. Attending physicians, for their part, are often too occupied with their own research and clinical practices—often in labs and offices outside of the hospital—to pay much attention to the house officers.
The implications for the public are profound. Nearly anyone admitted to a teaching hospital—and these are the most prestigious hospitals in the country—can expect to be cared for by residents and fellows. Whether house officers are well trained and, most important, whether they have the time to provide good care are crucial. Yet until Ludmerer’s book, there has been very little critical attention to these questions. It’s simply assumed that when you are admitted to a teaching hospital, you will get the best care possible. It’s odd that something this important would be regarded in such a Panglossian way.
Ludmerer refers to graduate medical education in the period between the world wars, following Osler, as the “educational era,” by which he means that the highest priority of teaching hospitals was education. Heads of departments were omnipresent on the wards, and knew the house officers intimately. A network of intense, often lifelong mentorships formed. Ludmerer gives a fascinating account of the propagation of talent; for example, William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins, had seventeen chief residents, eleven of whom subsequently established their own surgical residency programs at other institutions. Of their 166 chief residents, eighty-five became prominent faculty members at university medical schools. The influence of the giants of the era of education still reaches us through three, four, or five generations of disciples, and house officers quote Osler even today.
There was a strong moral dimension to this system. Ludmerer writes that “house officers learned that medicine is a calling, that altruism is central to being a true medical professional, and that the ideal practitioner placed the welfare of his patients above all else.” Commercialism was antithetical to teaching hospitals in the era of education. “Teaching hospitals regularly acknowledged that they served the public,” writes Ludmerer, “and they competed with each other to be the best, not the biggest or most profitable.”
Indeed, teaching hospitals deliberately limited their growth to maintain the ideal setting for teaching and research. Ludmerer offers the example of the prestigious Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston (now named the Brigham and Women’s Hospital), which in its 1925 annual report declared that it had “more patients than it can satisfactorily handle…. The last thing it desires is to augment this by patients who otherwise will secure adequate professional service.” They also kept prices as low as possible, and delivered large amounts of charity care. With few exceptions, members of the faculty did not patent medical discoveries or accept gifts from industry, and regularly waived fees for poor patients.
Editors Note - This book review by Dr. Lara Goitein, and the book she reviews by Ludmerer are well worth reading in full.
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