THE CLINICAL TEACHING OF THE MEDICAL STUDENT

In the recent Inter-Professional Conference on Education for Professional Responsibility¹ modern clinical teaching of the medical student was discussed by James H. Means, Jackson professor of clinical medicine in the Harvard Medical School. In the medical schools of the United States teaching falls into the two main divisions of preclinical and clinical. The preclinical subjects—anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, bacteriology and immunology—are taught in the medical schools much as such subjects are taught in colleges generally. Thereafter begins the clinical training which is distinctive in medical education. The student now studies the patient in the flesh, and his interests change from the inanimate to the human animate. Means emphasizes that somehow there has developed in the student by this time a definite predilection of interest in organic disease. Usually the purely functional or psychogenic aspects of human behavior have not become of deep concern to him. "He still sees the