Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.

• Author: Cordasco, Francesco

Not since the 1925 pioneering work of Abraham Flexner, Medical Education: A Comparative Study, has a book as ambitious as Thomas Neville Bonner's Becoming a Physician appeared. Much more comprehensive than Flexner's book (and infinitely more detailed), Bonner's volume is an encyclopedic history of Western medical education.

In a series of interrelated chapters (each of which may stand as an individual entity), Bonner deals with medical education in the late 18th century and the changing patterns of medical study; the lives of medical students and their teachers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the development of new goals in medical education; the clinic and laboratory in the mid 19th century; the spread of laboratory teaching and the continued struggle for the evolving laboratory curriculum to the end of the 19th century; the development of a university standard in medical education; the changing student populations in medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the emerging stability and new challenges in medical education to the mid 20th century.

It is a remarkable historical tableau, and Bonner presents the evolving and eclectic patterns with extraordinary detail as he skillfully weaves together the British...