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Eliminate Mechanics? U.C.L.A.'s Warren is proud of these changes in teaching. "When a young man enters this medical school, he buys a stethoscope the first day," he says. "We teach him a lot of things that weren't taught 15 or 20 years ago. Those men of past years were laboratory doctors: every doctor was a scientist and he carried science from the laboratory to the patient's bedside. Now we are going back to the bedside as human beings.
"There are three basic types of doctors coming out of U.S. medical schools: the healer, the scientist and the mechanic. We are looking for the healer and the scientist. Sometimes we get both in one package, and that is fine, but we are content if we have one or the other. We'd like to eliminate the mechanic, but let's face it: he does get into medical schools and he does get through them. When he gets out he usually drives a big car, has enormous prestige in his community and is usually rated as a successful man. We don't know just what it is that makes the healer. It is some sort of magnetism—the sort of thing that makes a patient respond as soon as the physician comes into the room or touches him."
It might be thought that the sheer volume of medical knowledge, which has increased with the speed of multiplying bacteria, would be a crushing burden in the training of doctors. Not so, says Staff Warren. "Medicine, although more complicated now than ever before, is actually easier to teach. A good school can still turn out a satisfactory, all-round physician in four years. We can teach more to a student today because we know more and can give more reasons for things. We have better teaching aids and better facilities. I can remember in my own days in med school when a lot of us were trying to listen to the heartbeat and couldn't be sure we were hearing what we were supposed to hear. Now, with electronic devices, a whole class or school—or most of West Los Angeles—can listen to a heartbeat if necessary. And they can hear it clearly and it can be clearly explained."
Chrome-Plated G.P.s. Despite Warren's emphasis on the all-round physician, most of his students will wind up as specialists. This is a serious problem. Some parts of the U.S. (especially the Southeast and the Mountain States) simply have not enough doctors of any kind. Southern California has or soon will have enough—but too many of them, proportionately, are specialists. Yet 77% of U.C.L.A.'s first two graduating classes have announced their intention of going into one of the 28 recognized specialties (from allergy to urology), many of them to become internists (sort of chrome-plated general practitioners who make a big thing of diagnosis but stop short of obstetrics and surgery). Fred George Smith Jr., who graduated last year in U.C.L.A.'s first medical class, is now finishing a pediatric internship at U.C.L.A. Medical Center Hospital. Says Smith, who plans to specialize: "The trend toward specialization is getting stronger despite all the efforts to get men into general practice. It isn't because most of the fellows think there is more money or prestige in specializing. But practically all the men feel that the body of medicine has become too big and complicated for any one man."