Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1938.

  • Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1938. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    conducting it to become careful, patient, persistent and intelligently critical and so is helpful in whatever work that is undertaken subsequently. Very few indeed are capable of investigation of such importance as to justify its being more than a minor part of his activities; its value is rather what it gives in training than what it adds to medical knowledge. This has been the attitude of our service to investigation; no great investigator so far has appeared; such are not made by any process of development, in my opinion, but so to speak are spon¬ taneous in occurrence; when one appears, every oppor¬ tunity to work out his ideas should be placed at his dis¬ posal. All of the various methods, some of which I have cited, intended chiefly to train broadly our men, may have seemed to you unimportant. To many of you, I dare say, there has been no thought at all as to why they were in use. However, one of the most delightful ex¬ periences of the medical service is to see house officers grow in power and develop in ability as they progress through the various steps of the service to greater and greater responsibility and to continue this development as assistant residents and residents, so that, when they leave us, we feel confident that we are sending out men well prepared to continue in their development and to take a high rank among their future colleagues. When the service was first organized, we instituted the graded progressive steps of the house officers’ service culminat¬ ing in a recognized responsibility first in the care of ward patients and then in the management of ambula¬ tory patients with a superimposed system of assistant residents and residents combining routine clinical re¬ sponsibility with entire freedom for investigation, a sys¬ tem then unique which in some respects has remained unique. This system appears to have been satisfactory in