Medical school

"[The master to the student:] I've a gift of my own, as strong as yours... I can detect a man in whom there may be a physician, and in you I feel a need to heal, so strong that it burns."

"[The medical student to the master, in 11th century Persia:] But if you were able to look within the center of the earth, would you? [The master:] Of course! [The student:] Yet you are able to peer inside the human body, but you do not [due to restrictions against human dissection]."

"[The student]...sighed ruefully, "I may end up no physician, for I am not a scholar".... [The master:] "Then you must build harder and faster than the others.""

"Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study than a student."

"Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as an honored member of the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack [sherry] and wine and methelgins [mead], and to drinkings and swearings and starings, pribbles and prattles"; but all that has changed with the curriculum."

"Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages."

"It is...in institutions that the [medieval] university tradition is most direct.... the notion of a curriculum of study...tested by examination and leading to a degree, as well as many of the degrees themselves-- bachelor, as a stage toward the mastership, master, doctor, in arts, law, medicine, and theology."

"[Regarding the registration of Vesalius into medical school in the year 1533] Vesalius matriculated in the medical school...He was now termed a philiater, one devoted to medicine."

""Mr. Rapp [a medical student], what is the difference between an element and a compound body?" Mr. Rapp is again obliged to confess his ignorance. "A compound body is composed of two or more elements," says the grinder, "in various proportions. Give me an example, Mr. Jones." [A "grinder" is an outdated term for a person who coaches students for an upcoming examination.] "Half-and-half is a compound body, composed of the two elements, ale and porter, the proportion of the porter increasing in an inverse ratio to the respectability of the public-house you get it from," replies Mr. Jones."

"The white coats...were symbol and proof that medicine was a guild, with a strict hierarchy, with steps up the stairway that you took not when you felt you were ready, but when you were permitted....You had to learn what was necessary, as decided by those who went before you, those who knew. You had to go up the steps, learn in order, no skipping, slow."

"...doing that one full and complete...[practice physical] exam was amazing. It was like making pottery or woodworking-- detailed, precise, careful. It was my first inkling that medicine was not only a science but also a craft. Everything mattered, everything was important and told a story. The patient's hands-- their warmth and dryness or cold and wetness; their nails, palms, pulse; the texture of their skin and hair; the presence or absence of lymph nodes-- and that was just up to the elbow."

"To watch a master of physical diagnosis in the execution of a complete physical examination is something of an aesthetic experience, rather like observing a great ballet dancer or a concert cellist."

"To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all."

"The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation."

"[An account of an American doctor who "went back to medical school" in Paris in the year 1836:] I get up in the morning at six o'clock and am at La Charité [hospital] by seven, follow Velpeau until eight, see him operate and lecture until half after nine, breakfast at ten at a café. At eleven I am at a school of practical anatomy, where I dissect until two. Then I attend a class of practical surgery until three; then hear Broussais and Andral until five; then dine. At seven I attend Helmagrande's class of midwifery, which lasts until nine; then I come to my room and read or write until eleven, when I retire."