PEDIATRICS Vol. 1 No. 6 June 1948, pp. 828-836
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THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

Editors: EDWARDS A. PARK, M.D..

ONE of the outstanding defects in our medical care system at the present time lies in the isolation of the medical schools which regard their educational obligations as confined to their medical students, to themselves, and to the abstract world. The result is that as soon as medical students become practicing physicians, they are cast adrift and obliged to rely on medical literature, occasional medical meetings and, it should be included, their contacts with the detail men from the drug houses, in order to keep abreast of medical progress. But medical practice is so time-consuming and exhausting that, when the day is done, there is left little leisure or spirit to study and there is no means at all, or very inadequate means, to come into personal contact with the special students of disease, the men who have had the opportunities to work on special problems until they have become authorities. It is because of the aloofness of the medical schools that the practitioners of the country become so dependent on representatives of the drug houses. But the physicians of the country are extraordinarily eager for new knowledge— the difficulty does not lie in any lack of desire—and this is illustrated so splendidly each year at the Academy of Pediatrics' meetings by the avidity with which our own members seek out the panel discussions at which eminent scholars, the country over, present their information and experience. Panel discussions, such as the Academy specializes in, afford opportunities to meet the authorities face to face. But panel discussions are only occasional and they are only substitute mediums for the transfer of facts and ideas. The most satisfactory medium is personal contact and discussion between the specialists on the one side, and the practicing physician, on the other, over a case. Perhaps the greatest benefit which could be brought to pass in medical care in this country would result if the medical schools could be made to descend from their ivory towers—to use Dr. James Wilson's methaphor—and extend their educational facilities to the practicing physicians of the country and to assume the task of keeping them informed as a full part of their responsibilities.