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Q: Does Tradition Make A Difference?
Wherever you
end up at medical school, one thing's certain: you'll learn through
a model shaped right here at Hopkins. A little more than a century ago,
a trail-blazing class arrived at this fledgling medical school to embark
on a new kind of training. Instead of learning medicine only through
a group of lectures, as would-be physicians had done up to that point,
these students also would gain hands-on experience by watching and caring
for patients and by doing experiments in the lab.
In a matter
of years, the Hopkins model would come to define excellence in medical
education all over the world. Johns Hopkins would be recognized as the
first school to treat medicine as a graduate-level pursuit instead of
a trade, the first to set up a rigorous four-year program of study and
the first to incorporate research techniques into a curriculum. In other
words, Johns Hopkins would become this nation's first modern medical
school.
The Past
Present
Whole volumes
have been dedicated to the storied history of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
But does that mean anything to the 21st century career you're about
to embark upon?
Quite a bit,
actually. You might say that at Johns Hopkins, the past plays the role
of an inspiring companion. Faculty and students walk the same corridors
once patrolled by legends like Welch, Halsted, Osler and Kelly (the
"Big Four" physicians in the famous John Singer Sargent painting).
At the moment, the names of those renowned physicians may not mean much
to you, but their legacy plays no small part in Hopkins' credo: to blaze
new trails in medicine and science.
You'll see
symbols of that commitment all over campus. Most of all, you'll find
it in the sense of purpose with which Hopkins faculty and students go
about what has always been the business of this place: building medicine's
future.
What's
with that pesky "s"?
As first names
go, ours doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Even though it's been
rather prominent for more than a century, Hopkins still endures the
occasional indignity of being dubbed "John" Hopkins.
But
such awkward moments seem a small price to pay for a university and hospital
whose names honor the Quaker founder who outlined their mission in his
will. Johns Hopkins' peculiar first name was simply a family affair; it
had been his great-grandmother's maiden name.
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