Martin Meenagh blog

Why Aren't Doctors working on dead bodies in their spare time?

Apparently, in many medical faculties, trainee medics now have a great deal of spare time, or at least, time when in the past they would have been hanging out at a morgue. In the near past, a doctor would associate themselves with a body, and then dissect it over the course of a year, and become familiar with the way a human being works. Now, academic education has supplanted such practical experience in British medical schools. That means that the curriculum has shifted towards 'life-long testing' based around computer screens, and academic performance as the only model of ability.

It also means that some medical schools are thinking of offering medicine as a joint degree in this country. When did actually practicing what you intend to do, before you did it, become so secondary in Britain? For all the rubbish about improved, test-based learning, and modular progress in education, in things like medicine and law, we seem to be heading backwards.

Patients who don't want juniors testing their skills by performing on them; doctors who have only ever seen a body intimately on screens and in books; professionals marked by their ability to pass exams so meaningless they are offered other subjects to study alongside them. Is anyone in academia thinking about what a vocation actually means anymore, or are we just raising money for the construction of industrial universities that turn out people who think along safe, validated lines?

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