Jacob: the other Flexner.

Jacob Flexner, the elder of his better-known siblings, Simon and Abraham, provided critical support and guidance to his brothers, paving the way for their subsequent successes.

Creation, evaluation, and continuing assurance of excellence of the certified surgical specialist.

A position paper on the subject of certified surgical specialists was published in 1966 under the direction of Professor Charles Wells of Liverpool, England. President John Terblanche of the International Federation of Surgical Colleges brought together leaders in surgical education from four nations (Australia, Japan, South Africa, United States) to update current "state-of-the art" views. Presentations were made at the 38th Congress of the International Society of Surgery, August 18, 1999 in Vienna, Austria.

Undergraduate surgical education for the twenty-first century.

This article addresses the problems associated with current undergraduate surgical education and discusses the requirements necessary for its improvement during the third and fourth years of medical school. It asserts that, coincident with the emphasis on faculty research and publication and expanded resident patient care duties, teaching, particularly medical student teaching, has assumed a very low priority. Third-year medical students are attached to surgical teams, where their education is haphazard and disorganized.

Problem-based learning: an effective educational method for a surgery clerkship.

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been implemented during the clinical years in a few medical schools. The purpose of this study is to determine whether PBL provides a better education than traditional methods. Students in the first and third rotations (n = 42) went through the traditional clerkship, which utilized Socratic teaching (SI), while students in the second and fourth rotations (n = 36) were taught by the PBL method.

The controllable lifestyle factor and students' attitudes about specialty selection.

Questionnaires were distributed to 346 fourth-year students in nine medical schools. The students were asked to state their selected specialty and to rank the importance that each of 25 influences, listed as questionnaire items, had had in making their choice of specialty. Factor analysis showed that particular items were significantly associated with particular factors.

Controllable lifestyle: a new factor in career choice by medical students.

To determine whether control of work hours (controllable lifestyle) was becoming an increasingly important factor in choices of specialties by medical students, data from three medical schools over the past ten, ten, and six years, respectively, were reviewed for the types of specialty training entered by students in the top 15% of their classes. Since students in the upper 15% of the class are likely to obtain the specialties of their choice, any change in the pattern of their specialty preferences probably reflects a general trend. Specialties that feature a controllable lifestyle (CL) were defined as anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pathology, psychiatry, and radiology.

Career change: in quest of a controllable lifestyle.

Over the past decade, top medical students are selecting "controllable lifestyle" (CL) specialties at an increasing rate. CL specialties include anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, pathology, psychiatry, and radiology. The choice of "noncontrollable lifestyle" (NCL) specialties such as family practice, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, and pediatrics was negatively affected by this trend.