Making Perceptive Physicians I

Reviews the book, The Student Physician as Psychotherapist edited by Ralph W. Heine (Ed.), C. Knight Aldrich, Edgar Draper, Mary Meuser, Jean Tippett and Harry Trosman (1962). This book recounts the experiences of the authors in teaching psychotherapy to three classes of senior medical students (some 200 individuals) during a seventeen-week externship in the psychiatry out-patient department of the University of Chicago School of Medicine. The aim of the four year sequence of psychiatric instruction is "broadening the students' understanding of the personality factors in themselves and in their patients which affect all forms of medical treatment." The aim of the senior externship itself is re-integration of earlier learned principles through the student's experiencing, with one patient, in a sustained and closely supervised fashion, the "use of himself as a therapeutic agent." Heine and his collaborators have provided both a provocative discussion of an ambitious program, and a comprehensive overview of the multiple factors in such a program, factors varying from the influences of the institutional and cultural environment to the problems of (and norms for) measuring the program's results in' patient improvement and in student learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)