The Closing of the Medical Mind: How Medical Education Has Failed Patients and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Medical Students
John Eberly, MA, Medical Student, University of South Carolina School of Medicine
2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of philosopher Allan Bloom’s surprise bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” (The original title was, significantly, “Souls Without Longing.”) In it, Bloom explores how higher education produced students who, to paraphrase R. R. Reno, “understood everything and were moved by nothing.”
Is the medical student mind similarly “closing”? Clinical tools like the H&P (history and physical) and bio-psycho-social-spiritual model offer the student a seemingly complete framework to “understand everything.” On the other hand, the foundations of medicine, professionalism, ethics, and the medical humanities are treated as an interesting but ultimately unnecessary addition to medical student understanding and formation. In the words of Wendell Berry, are the souls of medical students becoming lost, “having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from”?
Call it burnout, disillusionment, disenchantment, depersonalization, or depression. Blame it on “distance learning,” “economic and political forces,” or “the hidden curriculum.” Something is happening to the soul of the medical student. And as medical education produces such physicians who “understand” but are not moved, it is failing patients.
How do we then “open” the medical mind in such an age? I offer a pilot vision for a parallel medical school curriculum, called “Phronesis” (from the Greek, meaning “practical wisdom”), which I am currently leading with a physician at our medical school.
Building on recent trends toward such additions to medical training (The Healer’s Art, The Physician’s Vocation Program, The Fellowship in Theology, Medicine, & Culture), Phronesis is a monthly forum which follows the medical student through one year of study, exploring ten key components of medical student formation – features we’ve found conspicuously absent from medical education. We hope to awaken and challenge medical students to consider both how modern medicine is forming them and how to then live and practice with wisdom.
Only something like friendship and moral mentorship embedded within traditions and communities can heal what we see in medical education today. Only religion can renew the longings of impoverished souls. Though endeavors like Phronesis bear such limits from the start, we hope to imagine and inspire a medical education that remembers where medicine came from and questions where it is going – seeing patients and forming practitioners as “souls with longing.”
2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of philosopher Allan Bloom’s surprise bestseller “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” (The original title was, significantly, “Souls Without Longing.”) In it, Bloom explores how higher education produced students who, to paraphrase R. R. Reno, “understood everything and were moved by nothing.”
Is the medical student mind similarly “closing”? Clinical tools like the H&P (history and physical) and bio-psycho-social-spiritual model offer the student a seemingly complete framework to “understand everything.” On the other hand, the foundations of medicine, professionalism, ethics, and the medical humanities are treated as an interesting but ultimately unnecessary addition to medical student understanding and formation. In the words of Wendell Berry, are the souls of medical students becoming lost, “having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from”?
Call it burnout, disillusionment, disenchantment, depersonalization, or depression. Blame it on “distance learning,” “economic and political forces,” or “the hidden curriculum.” Something is happening to the soul of the medical student. And as medical education produces such physicians who “understand” but are not moved, it is failing patients.
How do we then “open” the medical mind in such an age? I offer a pilot vision for a parallel medical school curriculum, called “Phronesis” (from the Greek, meaning “practical wisdom”), which I am currently leading with a physician at our medical school.
Building on recent trends toward such additions to medical training (The Healer’s Art, The Physician’s Vocation Program, The Fellowship in Theology, Medicine, & Culture), Phronesis is a monthly forum which follows the medical student through one year of study, exploring ten key components of medical student formation – features we’ve found conspicuously absent from medical education. We hope to awaken and challenge medical students to consider both how modern medicine is forming them and how to then live and practice with wisdom.
Only something like friendship and moral mentorship embedded within traditions and communities can heal what we see in medical education today. Only religion can renew the longings of impoverished souls. Though endeavors like Phronesis bear such limits from the start, we hope to imagine and inspire a medical education that remembers where medicine came from and questions where it is going – seeing patients and forming practitioners as “souls with longing.”