A psychological regard of medical education : Bradshaw lecture (abridge), delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London, November 2nd 1933 / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
1933?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A psychological regard of medical education : Bradshaw lecture (abridge), delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London, November 2nd 1933 / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    intelligence—tlie ability to discern and to utilise relevant relations, whether between ideas, written symbols, or concrete objects. Now two of the most obvious essentials for entry into the medical profession are at least a minimal amount of general intelligence and at least a minimal amount of what we may usefully term scientific ability—the ability to employ scientific methods and to appreciate scientific evidence. Within the medical profession the field of possible occupations is so wide that opportunities are afforded for unusual excess or defect in almost every other kind of mental ability and in almost every trait of personality. The student who is temperamentally averse from close and continual social intercourse may gravitate towards medical research or to preventive medicine ; if he excel in manual dexterity, he may specialise in surgery ; should his interests lie pre¬ dominantly in the young, in the poor, in the workings of the mind, or in country life, he may satisfy them by engaging in corresponding medical practice. But unless he be endowed with at least the required minimum both of general intelligence and of scientific ability, no applicant for vocational guidance can be advised to enter as a medical student; high general intelligence being useless to him, if it be conjoined only with literary, musical, or other special abilities, ancl adequate scientific ability being hardly conceiv¬ able in the absence of sufficient general intelligence. Within the field of industry and commerce, the industrial psychologist always insists that those of the new entrants who have the innate aptitudes requisite for them to rise later to the higher positions in their firm should be recognised as soon as possible and should receive early suitable training to fit them ultimately to such posts. At the universities a similar separation is made: the pass man and the honours man are segregated from the first to receive different educations and to undergo different examinations. Even in the elementary schools it is becoming more and more usual for the bright, the average, and the stupid children to be grouped and instructed sepa¬ rately, so that the more highly intelligent are not hindered by the needs of the less intelligent and the latter are not pushed with the vain object of keeping pace with the former. And despite certain conceiv¬ able objections, the advantages of such differentiation have become generally recognised. But in medical education, as in the case of other professional curricula, whatever be their general intelligence and their special
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