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November 24, 2009
Dedication to the craft
MCV Medical Class of 1903, originally uploaded by VCU Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections.
Work this past week took me to Long Beach, California, and then off to Cleveland the day after. Unfortunately, several broken airplanes and 8 hours of delays waylaid my plans, and I spent the night in Denver. Then, today, as I again attempted to get to Cleveland, another plane broke. Now, I'm in Newark, New Jersey, still trying to get home. Don't ask.
When I was in Denver, I picked up the Denver Post, and read this interesting article:
More than one nervous medical student has entered Robin Mulroney's hospital gown from the bottom to listen to her lungs.
Aspiring doctors also have been known to forget to release blood-pressure cuffs after taking the vitals of their "patient." And there was the time a student inserted a speculum upside-down during one of LoriLynne Lawson's many pelvic exams endured in the name of training future physicians.
The days when medical students learned how to examine patients just by watching real doctors in action and then trying it themselves are now supplemented by people such as Mulroney and Lawson: "standardized patients" who are paid $20 to $50 per hour to let students poke inside their ears and tap on their stomachs.
These fake patients, many of them professional actors looking for extra money, can cry on demand when they are "diagnosed" with cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Strong memorization skills are a must: Patients have to stick to a script saturated with family history of disease, medications, sexual history and surgeries.
This strikes me as extremely undignified, yet noble. Like a janitor, or gravedigger. I don't know. $50 an hour to get probed all day is not a bad chunk of change, but I don't know if I could tolerate it. I suppose one eventually gets used to it.
Anyway, this picture reminds me of a very cool book I found. Dissection is a study of medical schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on how schools acquired cadavers, and how students entertained themselves with the cadavers. Obviously, students nowadays treat their cadavers with much greater dignity. Rightfully so, I think.
entry no. 1416
Posted at November 24, 2009 05:50 PM