"Medical students are ball bearingssmooth, round, all alike and never creating friction." So said an admissions official at a New York medical school a few years ago. There are still many aspiring physicians who are politically conservative and personally conformist and whose overriding concern is the second Cadillac. This summer, however, as many of the nation's 35,000 student doctors begin summer programs or internships, there is friction aplenty, and a new, rough-edged type of student activist is very much in evidence.
Carl Nathan, a Harvard Medical School sophomore, is a lean, personable redhead who recently testified against the...