@SirBill: the power of social media to transform medical education

If William Osler were to visit today the hospitals in Montreal, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Oxford where he taught in the latter part of the 19th century, he would encounter an array of innovations—robotic surgery, genomic sequencing, organ transplantation, to name a few—that formed no part of the medical landscape of his own time. On the other hand, the system of medical education used at those same hospitals would be familiar to Sir William. He would recognise the model of specialist residencies that he (along with the surgeon William Halsted and others) introduced, and he would no doubt be gratified to see that his success in moving clinical education from the abstractions of the lecture hall to the realities of the bedside has endured.1 It is striking that, while scientific discovery and technological innovation moved diagnostic and therapeutic practice forward by leaps and bounds, the model of medical...
Source: Postgraduate Medical Journal - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Emergency medicine, Editor's choice, Immunology (including allergy), Transplantation, Sociology Editorials Source Type: research