1800 Medical Education

During the mid-18th to late 19th-century medical education/training did not exist, during this time the practice of medicine was not seen as a profession. Everyone who had the desire to be physician could practice medicine, even without any scientific knowledge. According to Shi and Singh (2015), “from about 1800 to 1950, medical training was largely received through an individual apprenticeship with a practicing physician” and not through university education as is do it in the present (p. 87). In the United Stated (U.S.), during the preindustrial era, the American medicine was falling behind compared to the medical education, medical advances and research in Europe. Additionally, medical procedures in the U.S. were primitive and lack a scientific base to support them. “By 1800, only four medical schools existed in the U.S.: College of Philadelphia, King’s College, Harvard Medical School, and Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College” (Shi & Singh, 2015, p.87). The medical schools that existed during 1800 were owned and managed by physicians and lacked practical clinical education in hospitals, also required less than the actual years of education for graduation.
It was not until the late 19th to late 20th century, when medical education in the U.S.
improved and implemented a partnership with hospitals to implement a practical medical education in the training of new
physicians.
Nowadays, in the U.S. there is a hospital-based training for physicians and this has led to producing more specialists than primary care physicians (Shi & Sing, 2015, p. 131). For teaching hospitals, the principal source of funding was the Medicare program and because of the high ratio between current practicing specialists and primary care physicians, medical education is being refocused in patient-centered cared instead of acute care. Since specialization in physicians was growing, hospitals started to play a critical role in medical education and research, one example is the Johns Hopkins Hospital medical school, that opened on 1893, that combined clinical practice with teaching (Shi & Singh, 2015, p. 295). Also, hospitals became the center of medical research in adjunction with medical schools, medical researchers work in close contact with hospitals. With the ongoing discovery of unknown diseases or medical complications, it is very important that medical researchers use the available data in hospitals to create novel treatments and improve current procedures for the safety and health promotion of the patients. In the past the U.S. was lagged behind Europe in medical training and medical research but in the mid 1800’s the field of medical research started to growth in the U.S. Nowadays the Association of American Medical Colleges (AMMC), founded in 1876, set the minimum standards for medical education and the American Medical Association (AMA), formed in 1847, regulates medical licensing (Shi & Singh, 2015, p. 92).