University of Michigan Medical and Nursing School - Aequanimitas Yearbook (Ann Arbor, MI)

Page 99 text:

REFLECTIONS The new freshman program leads us to speculate on what may be one of its longer range effects. With the increasing number of debates concerning socialized medicine Qan intellectual euphemism being 'cmedical rights for everyonewj and the increasing social turmoil of the poor, it has been made more obvious that the medical services of our country are inequitably distributedg a large portion of the medical community has specialized in the diseases of the rich or D- gr-f--. xg: i xg?- v .V 'vi is Q' 9 la. ' ff' 1-X 3 'T v P it . 5 up ' 2 S, f if M 1 A drifted into necessary but removed research work, One might argue, however, that even if the physicians of the country were so motivated to set up hypotheticalclinics in the poor rural South or rotting city ghettoes, that there would not be enough M.D.'s to go around, that the quality of medical ser- vice would be compromised in trying to care for the masses. This argument is full of short-comings, which do not concern us now, but it does make the good point that in an economic sense, the supply of physicians is grossly less than the demand. A socialized

Page 98 text:

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Page 100 text:

l L l . An l A l Judith Rosengard joel Ross john Rubbo Mark Sager Leonard Sahn I 57' os- , 322, f if S t if ff' 2 .ff in A As ' h Ival Salyer Elliot Schaffer H. D. Schneider D. L. Schomer William Sclar medical health service, though providing needed care to many now deprived, will not correct the supply shortage. Yet neither will the status quo suffice. One must find rather why the supply of physicians is so small. The reasons for this shortage are many but I see one as primary, that being the popular premedical, medical, intern and on up to the physician image. This image is one of a pre- medical student, who because of overly vigo- rous entrance requirements, must follow a narrow, difficult and usually irrelevant under-graduate career Ci.e.-taking such required courses as comparative anatomy, organic chemistry, and quantatative analy- sisjg it is an image of a medical student who is kept in class forty hours a week Cwhile other graduate students attend fifteen hoursj, who must memorize volumes of facts and numbers, also have little time or opportu- nity for creative work, and who are con- stantly tired and tense, it is the image of an intern, who after eight years of strenuous training now earns less than a milk man, who works an eighty hour week, and who sees his wife and family on Sundays and Christmas, it is the image of the physician, wealthy but with no time to enjoy it, who has no time for his children and who gener- ally dies ten years before his peers. It is the image to many of a selfless life, but to the educated class considering it as a profession, it is an image of distasteful perversion. The