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Some Current-Day Problems of Surgical Education: Every Man His Own Boswell

Owen H. Wangensteen, MD

JAMA. 1968;205(12):841-845.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

What is surgery? Many are inclined to define surgery as a mode of therapy, and, in a sense, every discipline of clinical medicine could be so defined. As medicine emerged from the myths of superstition into an art reflecting insight, interpretability, and understanding, the breadth of medicine enlarged to include probing of the causes of disease as well as the likely outlook of diseased states. When medicine assumed aspects of a science, progress was accelerated by analyzing the successes and failures of past empiricism. Scientific inquiry fostered the birth of many new disciplines, a germinal fecundity which continues to make an accelerating impact upon medicine's advance.

Though it is no longer possible, therefore, to label any discipline of medicine as merely a form of therapy, some in the present hierarchy of medicine, yes even within the sanctums of curricular committees, continue to insist that surgery is only that. It is . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Surgery and the Health Sciences Center, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis.

Footnotes
Adapted from the 35th E. Starr Judd Lecture, read at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, May 23, 1968.

Reprint requests to PO Box 610, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis 55455 (Dr. Wagensteen).

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