What does the student want from medical school? What does he get? These questions concern not only every teacher, but every physician who is interested in his profession.
There is no doubt that this is a permissive age. It must be expected that the solid walls of structured curricula will continue to be battered by waves of electivism. In some schools, almost all clinical subjects have become elective; in every curriculum, relaxation of strict requirements is the order of the day.
In any such revision, the teaching of surgery has tended to become particularly vulnerable. If surgery is the mere repetition of mechanical motions, as some educators believe, it would be appropriate to relegate it to postgraduate education or to a trade school. Medicine, meanwhile, remains relatively inviolate. This is true for many reasons, of which the most practical is that a student may be given important responsibility for the