Dean of Medical School Sees Grind Poor as Physician

Bookworms are not wanted in medical school, according to Dr. Worth Hale, Assistant Dean of the Harvard Medical School.

"Medicine is a profession which, perhaps more than any other, involves personal contact," he explained. You've got to be a man to be a doctor, and you can't develop personally by spending all your time over books.

Hale continued, "One of the ways you can develop leadership and self-confidence is by going out for extra-curricular activities. Of course, you must not neglect your studies, but outside activities force you against hurdles, and it is doing the hard things that really makes a man."

Requirements Not Uniform

Concerning the courses a pre-medical student should take, Hale pointed out that admission requirements of all the schools are not the same, and a student should therefore study the catalogues of several schools before deciding his curriculum. In any case, he stressed the advisability of taking elementary courses in quantitative analysis and embryology.

"In choosing his non-required courses," Hale said, "The student should stress his weakness rather than continue in his strongest field. It is only by so doing that he can strengthen these weaknesses and make himself a complete man.

"It is to this purpose," he continued, "that I advise the Bio-Chemical sciences as a field of concentration. If you don't go out for honors, this will only involve one course in addition to the minimum requirements for medical school. The other courses will then be free for broad, cultural subjects."