Will medical schools really redefine their mission?

April 25, 2009 YJHM Blog


Those who believe that medical schools should loosen their stringent focus on students’ scientific prowess as the cardinal quality for acceptance and accept students with more diverse backgrounds will be gratified to read an article which appeared in the March 18, 2009 JAMA titled “Report:Growth of Medical Schools Brings Opportunity to Redefine Their Mission”.

One physician was quoted as saying that at his school they were not going to accept students based on their past aptitudes in the usual premedical scientific curriculum. The article didn’t say exactly what the new admission criteria would be but mentioned the importance of students with “diverse backgrounds and diverse previous life pursuits”.

It struck me as peculiar, that no where in the article were the words “humanities” or “humanism” or “liberal arts” mentioned. I would have expected that at least once the value of having studied the liberal arts would have been mentioned as important background education for admission to medical school. The need to address racial, economic, and geographic imbalance were all mentioned but nothing about the value of the humanities as a premedical school experience.

I hope that the humanities and the liberal arts are given more than just lip service when it comes to the medical schools’ professed desire to redefine their mission by remodeling their admissions process.

I suspect that many medical school educators are not really interested in accepting more students with liberal arts backgrounds and fewer with the traditional scientific training. It means reversing a scientific and cultural trend that has been in existence for almost a hundred years.

Ed Volpintesta MD