The end of medical schools
A few months back, I was walking past the entrance of the old Edinburgh Medical School, founded in 1726. A not-so-crazy thought came into my head, one that I could not dismiss: we need to move on from the idea that a Medical School must be situated within a University (and of course, it wasn’t always, anyway). The founding set of ideas that we have struggled with ever since Flexner, we should now recast for a very different world. We need to create something new, something that makes sense in terms of a university and something that puts professional training within a professional context. At present, we fail on both of these accounts. Rather than integrate we should fracture. We need to search out our own new world.
