Adventures in Medical Education

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

George Canby Robinson has had as varied experience as any living medical teacher. Here he tells the full story of medical education during the heroic age of American medicine.

The author introduces his subject with a brief history of medical education up to the beginning of the present century. The autobiographical account begins when the author entered the Johns Hopkins Medical School and continues with his training in the Pennsylvania Hospital and in the Medical Clinic of Friedrich Müller in Munich. Subsequently, Dr. Robinson took part in organization and administration as well as in teaching and research in the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and in several university medical schools; he gives an account of the development of these institutions and of the men who took prominent parts in the new era of scientific medicine in this country.

Adventures in Medical Education describes how medical research evolved and how modern medicine spread to such key institutions as Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, how it grew in China at the Peiping Union Medical College, and finally how it was used in New York City at the Cornell Medical School.

Concluding with a discussion of some basic principles and present-day problems of medical education, the author shows how important medical developments constitute an integral part of our cultural history.