Becoming a Physician

Written by eminent education scholar Thomas Neville Bonner, Becoming A Physician is a groundbreaking, comprehensive history of Western medical education. The only work of its kind, it covers the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Comparative in focus, the narrative unfolds within the context of social, political, and intellectual transformations that occurred in Europe and North America between the Enlightenment and Nazi Germany. Viewing the late eighteenth century as a watershed in the development of medical education, Bonner begins by describing how earlier practices evolved in the 1800s with the introduction of clinical practices. He then traces the growth of laboratory teaching in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century preoccupation with establishing a university standard of medical education. Throughout, Bonner pays particular attention to the students, chronicling their daily lives and discussing changes in the medical school population and the various biases-- class, gender, racial, and religious--students and prospective students faced.