ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, American medical educators have been engaged in recurrently reforming the curriculum of the country’s medical schools. One of the constant aims of these repeated reforms has been to enrich the so-called biomedical education that students receive with what has been dichotomously and awkwardly termed “non-biomedical” intellectual and attitudinal training. The overall goal of these attempts to improve medical education has been to foster students’ ability to integrate biomedical, social, cultural, and ethical ways of observing, analyzing, and understanding into the diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic aspects of the physician’s role for which they are being prepared. Within the framework of this perennial curriculum reform, periodically—often accompanied by “magic-bullet-like” expectations—medical educators have designated particular disciplines as vehicles of the improved, non-biomedical training that they desire to effect. At present, it is predominantly bioethics that is regarded as the chief conveyor of improvement. But in 1969, when I was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania, it was principally to psychiatry and the social sciences (often referred to as the behavioral sciences) that medical educators delegated this task. The relatively few social scientists who were appointed to faculty positions in medical schools were most likely to be affiliated with departments of psychiatry. I was one of those social scientists.
