Defeating Doctors

CHEMISTRY 20, Harvard's only introductory organic chemistry course, bounced the 11 per cent of its enrollees who received Ds or Es last semester. The course's "sympathetic" instructors apologized with a curt "We're sorry if this ruins any of your career plans." Organic chemistry is the most important of the five courses (the others include biology, physics, math, and an inorganic chemistry course) required for entrance to medical school. An A in Chem 20 virtually insures one of this nation's scarce med school places, an unsatisfactory grade virtually insures rejection.

The Chem 20 grading curve--significantly out of kilter with normal Harvard grading--illustrates one way in which Harvard reinforces restrictive medical school admissions policies. In view of the tremendous need for well trained and dedicated physicians and health care specialists, the University should encourage, not discourage, pre-medical studies. The completion of the new undergraduate science center provides ample laboratory and lecture facilities; there are enough graduate students to act as qualified section leaders. There is no longer cause--if in fact there ever was--for Harvard to attempt to limit the size of a course that remains mandatory for those wishing to enter medical careers. Required pre-med courses represent a screening procedure in assigning students to the small number of vacancies in the nation's medical schools.

But the problem is more deeply rooted in the existing power structure of the medical profession in this country than in Harvard's complicity in maintaining that order. Medical schools require the five courses because of state licensing requirements which are presumably dictated by the American Medical Association. Virtually all states demand that students take these courses during their residence as undergraduates in order to be licensed to practice after medical school. Therefore a student who enters the College with credit for an Advanced Placement course in one of these sciences must take an upper level course in that subject to fulfill this pointless requirement.

It is presumed that familiarity with the content of introductory courses in these sciences is an aid in the pursuit of medical school studies, but we question their direct value in producing competent practicing physicians. And while we are led to believe that the education offered in this nation's medical schools continues to be the best in the world, we must also question the value of some of the four-year courses of study for producing capable physicians.

It is time for the University to purge itself of its complicity in restricting the number of medical personnel. It is the task of Harvard and the nation's other colleges and universities to take a leading role in abolishing the arbitrary restriction on the number of physicians in this country.

The University must produce a new pre-med plan to ameliorate the intense competition that turns many Harvard pre-meds into computers of recall that do not possess dedication to an America of healthier people, but rather, dedication to their individual "professional" careers. Pre-med students taking introductory biology, inorganic chemistry and physics have a choice of two routes to follow, thus alleviating some of the pressure caused by the existence of only one course. But even this system, as now conceived, discourages non-pre-med students and non-science concentrators from studying science except to fulfill lower-level Nat Sci requirements. Harvard is simply playing along with the American Medical Association's twisted conceptions about how to train physicians and restrict their numbers.