Every fall, medical schools welcome nearly 20,000 college graduates. They arrive anticipating endless hours of lectures, too much coffee, and infinite facts to memorize. There is one thing they do not expect, however. I know. Forty-nine years ago, I was one of them.
The first day I walked onto the wards was in spring of 1967. I was in St. Louis, doing my second year of medical school. Previously my presence in the hospital had been restricted to the cafeteria. I was twenty-three, had only examined the eyes and ears of my classmates — never a patient — and was about to perform an unsupervised cardiac exam.
Anxiously, I waited with an instructor and three classmates outside the room of our assigned patient. We had just finished eight weeks of lectures on how to perform a physical exam, with two weeks devoted exclusively to the examination of the heart.
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