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If the medical profession is in trouble with American society—and few would doubt this—the major responsibility for its plight must rest with the full-time professors of medicine in the 113 medical schools in the United States. The indictment can be summarized in a sentence. They sit in the crucial positions to exert the vital intellectual leadership required, and they have fallen short. Professors in departments of internal medicine are generally charged with the responsibility of introducing students to clinical medicine. As practitioners of internal medicine, their influence on the style and pattern of medical care practiced by the young house staff is immense. Just as it is rational to ascribe much of the responsibility for an adolescent's problems to early home experience, medicine's behavioral problems must be attributed, in part, to the training program and the most influential of the student's instructors during these years—the professors of medicine.
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