Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.
Interpretation
Medical education aims to safeguard community health rather than just serve as a career pathway for students.
This quote emphasizes the primary purpose of medical education, which is to prioritize the health and well-being of the community over merely training individuals for profitable careers. It suggests that those who enter the medical field should be motivated by a sense of duty toward public health, highlighting the larger societal responsibility of healthcare professionals.
In practice
During a speech at a medical conference advocating for public health.
Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.
No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?
Disease is not something personal and special, but only a manifestation of life under modified conditions, operating according to the same laws as apply to the living body at all times, from the first moment until death.
Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.
The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.
Education - lifelong education for everyone - from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers - is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.