The Georgians took 14 years, the Victorians were happy with 5, and the French Revolutionaries thought patients should decide. As an argument brews about the length of medical training, Vanessa Heggie explains how we got our current system. In 2013 an independent review of medical training, chaired by Prof. Dr David Greenaway, suggested that the length of post-graduate training could be reduced. Today the Royal College of Physicians and the British Medical Association have expressed concerns that this reduction might harm patient safety. The existing core system of medical training in the UK is around a century and a half old; the medical undergraduate degree was made the main way for doctors to qualify in the late nineteenth century, and postgraduate education has been slowly added to the system through the twentieth century. If we go back further than that things start to get complicated. To become the most elite sort of doctor in the eighteenth century, a physician and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), you generally had to complete an MD at either Oxford or Cambridge. This included a masters in liberal arts, followed by a licence and a doctorate in medicine, which could take up to fourteen years to complete. Most of this time was spent learning Greek and Latin, studying ancient texts and classic works, quite a lot of philosophy and rhetoric, and extremely little in the way of natural sciences or practical medicine. ….the physician and surgeon of the highest possible attainments, are thus treated by the Apothecaries’ Society, like toads under a harrow Continue reading...
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