The first two years of medical school are all about cramming for anatomy and physiology examinations. This might sound a lot. No sweat. Top medical students have already been well, perhaps too well, prepared for the required knowledge tests even before getting into medical school. Good for them. 

What's not so good for them -- walking anatomy encyclopedias as they might be -- is their ignorance of how embarrassingly backward American medicine was when the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine came on the scene in 1893. Before Johns Hopkins, all American medical schools had been looked down upon by Europeans. The American students who went to France or Germany for medical training were reluctant to practice or teach in America where their advanced expertise was under-appreciated. 

Scandalously, for instance, a Harvard medical student who failed 4 out of 9 courses earned his M.D. in 1870. A year earlier, Harvard president Charles Eliot openly advocated reforming America's medical education. That, however, didn't prevent Harvard's laboratory of experimental medicine (the first in any American university ) from being nearly DOA (dead on arrival) in 1871 if not funded by a professor's family in time. Ridiculously, in the same year, Harvard's professor of pathologic anatomy admitted that he had no idea how to use a microscope! Worse still, someone who had an M.D. from Harvard administered lethal doses of morphine on three of his patients because of utter incompetence. It's little wonder that "therapeutic nihilism" prevailed when American physicians had nothing to show for their worth in that era.

We need to teach our medical students the above not-so-proud history of American medicine. At the same time, they should also learn about how American medicine survived and came out even stronger during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Medical students are not supposed to be history buffs, but they'd better acquire a historical perspective on their future profession as well as the current COVID pandemic.

Author: Lingyang Jiang

S. Weir Mitchell --- In the 1870s he was promisingly studying the immune system and developing antitoxins through his experiments with snake venom. However, neither the University of Pennsylvania nor Jefferson Medical College offered him a teaching position because both American institutions had no interest in medical research.

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