Medical education at the peak of the era of experimental medicine.

Abstract

IT was A simple matter to identify the 1960s as the decade during which experimental medicine peaked, and further to pinpoint 1965 as the apogee of that era. To be sure, research budgets have increased since then, there are more investigators, and more full-time medical school faculty members. Most important of all, there have been spectacular advances in medicine since 1965. Yet something has been lost, and it is best described as the loss of a boundless optimism about the future of academic medicine. In the middle 1960s, all may not have been right with the world, but it was about as all right in the microcosm of American medicine as it had ever been before, or would ever be again. Research funding seemed guaranteed for anyone with a reasonable research project, and there was ample money for research training and for new full-time faculty. A powerful health lobby worked with the Congress to persuade that legislative body that biom?dical research could solve the problems of disease and could make us a healthier nation if only it would provide adequate funding for the NIH. Academic medicine had been on a steady upward course since the end of World War II, and the future seemed equally bright. Yet, national events at the end of the decade dampened that optimism, and questions began to be asked about the relevance of academic medicine to the problems of the larger society. Perhaps no decade in this century can be said to have been more pivotal in determining the future of academic medicine, and even the future of the practice of medicine, than the decade of the 1960s.