An Inexperienced Student Doctor Taking the Pulse of a Patient in His Bed

Medical students have always learned at the bedside and always will. The question is how to ensure that they learn from experience, with the correct amount of supervision and without harming patients or themselves. Baron Guillaume Dupuytren advised to ‘read little, see much, do much’ (attributed), but William Stewart Halsted wrote that ‘the intern suffers not only from inexperience, but also from over-experience’ ( ² ). Each generation of teachers and learners must decide where the balance lies.