Letters
Volume 189 - Issue 4

Selecting medical students

Author:  Peter C Arnold

Med J Aust 2008; 189 (4): 235-236. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2008.tb02000.x
Published online: 18 August 2008
Download PDF (382 KB)
Share: Share on Blue Sky Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share by email

To the Editor: The article by Wilkinson and colleagues1 and the accompanying editorial by Powis2 remind me of the medieval debate about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin.

While there is obvious merit in selecting students able to actually pass medical school examinations,3 preferably at their first attempt, where is the evidence that this correlates with their later performance as medical chemists, physicists, researchers, puzzle-solvers, mechanics, artists, analysts or “jacks of all trades”?

What is the point of trying to select students on the basis that they would make good “doctors”, when medicine, perhaps the broadest of all churches, offers professional scope to people of almost every imaginable natural bent and talent?

Selecting for interpersonal relationship skills is fine if selecting general practitioners and psychiatrists. How relevant is it, however, for someone whose talents and skills are intellectual curiosity or manual dexterity?4

Powis wants us to produce doctors who have “the required skills”. Is this not the role of postgraduate educational bodies, helping the undifferentiated graduate pursue a course relevant to their abilities and interests?

If, faced with an almost infinite variety of doctoring, we cannot define “doctor” other than by possession of a medical degree, how can we possibly define the attributes needed to be one?

There are many more important issues in health care that could benefit from the time and money being wasted on chasing this particular chimera.

View this article on Wiley Online Library