The Youngest Science
Ayers, William R.
THE YOUNGEST SCIENCE NOTES OF A MEDICINE-WATCHER Lewis Thomas Viking, $14.95, 270 pp. William R. Ayers I AM MAD at Lewis Thomas. He has written my book. That he has done so with greater...
...Medical students are scientific automatons, masters of multiple guess exams, unable to think, only to regurgitate...
...It is also irrelevant that I cannot draw on as rich a list of experiences as he...
...It is rather that the financial stability of the university medical center depends on it...
...This from the one who elsewhere has classified technology in the most lucid of terms...
...It would make little difference if I had, for few possess Thomas's clarity, wit or wisdom to profit by such experiences...
...Residents are overworked, buried in technology, trained rather than educated...
...Medicine is its own worst enemy...
...Medical school curricula are immutable anachronisms, packed with unnecessary research facts, out of step with the modern needs of an ever more sophisticated consumer...
...Who else would find incredible beauty in myco-plasmas or link blood hounds, tracking mice, and the mechanism of skin-graft rejection...
...In between the chapters of pure narration, he has skillfully interspersed essays on House Calls, Leeches, Nurses, en-dotoxin, olfaction, and illness...
...Each is a career in itself...
...He is on the side of nurses who want their professional status enhanced and their pay increased, who infuriate doctors by their claims to be equal professionals...
...One of Thomas's knacks is the use of an uncertain tongue-in-cheek...
...Or as well...
...The tragedies have already been written...
...Nor did I graduate from Harvard, intern at the Boston City, train at the Neurologic Institute in New York City, do research at the Rockefeller Institute, Hopkins, Tulane or the University of Minnesota, chair departments at NYU, take sabbatical at Cambridge, Dean at NYU and Yale, or round off as Chancellor at the Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center...
...I am not really mad at Lewis Thomas...
...Unbridled conflicts of interest between entrepreneurs and universities sit on the horizon...
...As federal dollars are withdrawn, the onus of balancing the budget falls to increased tuition, greater endowment, larger practice loads, new liaisons with private industry or some combination of all the above...
...He dislikes computers because they are personally humiliating...
...No one could have done better...
...To survive in the competitive grantsmanship game, pressured researchers have falsified results and published lies...
...From such keen observations does serendipity spring...
...He prefers the lanthanic presentation of the unexpected connection...
...The profession is under attack from without and within...
...Medicine sorely needs a book like The Youngest Science now...
...My father was not a physician, so I did not have the opportunity to observe him in general practice in the early 1900s...
...He admonishes beginning students to be apprehensive lest their real job, caring for sick people, be taken away, leaving them with the quite different occupation of looking after machines...
...Practitioners are money-grabbing, and insensitive...
...Does he, in fact, believe that humans, the most improbable of all earth's creatures, will survive because of more improbable luck...
...Can so learned a man's impression that he has gained more from his wife than he has given to her be accurate...
...How many others injected enzymes into rabbits' veins but failed to .notice that their ears softened, finally hanging down like spaniels...
...Does he really mean that Oliver Wendell Holmes's dictum (the key to longevity is to have a chronic incurable disease and take good care of it) works...
...It is not just that the funding policies of the National Institutes of Health in the mid-1950s fostered the idea that all faculty members in every medical school must be working scientists with research grants...
...The careful reader will hear a clarion in Thomas's words...
...That he has done so with greater perceptivity, more incisive language, and almost poetic phraseology is immaterial...
...Surely his proposal to put women, born teachers and nurturers, in charge of thermonuclear decisions is not serious...
...just jealous...
...Lewis Thomas gives us the fire and fun of learning and growing...
...Thomas's reflections on "hope" mute the clarion...
...Or as well...
...fallible, unpredictable creativity...
...Perhaps Dr...
...Artificial intelligence he dislikes...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
