John's Medical School Life - How to Cut Up Dead Bodies and Disgust People

[wellingtongoose]

What was John’s time at medical school like?

What kind of courses would he have taken?

What do medical students actually do?

In this meta I explore John’s life at university and I draw on my own experiences as a medical student to provide a short resource for anyone who is interested in John’s earlier life or writing fanfiction concerning the subject

Comments

[eglantine_br]

As always I am very interested in what you have to say. I like the idea that you got to meet the family of your cadaver. Husband and I signed up as an organ donors years ago, but if we end up as a cadaver instead, (as I hear sometimes happens,) that would be really cool.

My daughter has spent a fair amount of time in hospitals. (She has seizures.) We have often had medical students come through the room to talk to us. As I, and she get older, they seem to stay the same age.

I can totally imagine young John feeling like once he got through school he was no longer going to take any crap!

[neverminetohold]

Excellent and informative post as usual :) Though I'm a bit sad to hear that the Hippocratic Oath has lost its importance... I always found the thought very reassuring, for some reason, that doctors swear to 'do no harm'... I'm probably outdated too, but to me, such an oath still holds great value.

[swissmarg]

Very interesting as always! I especially like the graphics, they are very clever. My mother actually donated her body to science. (Here, in fact.) So I guess she was one of those cadavers for medical students to dissect. We got her ashes back about a year after she died. They were simply sent to a local funeral home. There was no ceremony or meeting any medical students. That would have been seriously creepy.

[thekumquat]

Just to add that if John did Medicine at Cambridge, after the two preclinical years medics did an 'intercalated bachelors' and did a year doing third year courses (known as Part II) to get a BA. Usually a NatSci degree, but other courses were feasible, like languages, management, sociology

[wellingtongoose]

Yep I can personally verify that you are completely correct. Cambridge clinical school has clawed back its reputation in the last decade. In the 90s it was apparently not very good for clinical stuff and anyone with ambition went to London. Now a days more people want to stay in Cambridge than the clinical school takes as there are 300 undergrads and 150 clinical places.

I don't think any colleges mixed their path supervisions. We did have supervisions with the vets for biochem only. After that we were more likely to have multiple college groups rather than mixed subjects from one college.

I doubt John went to Cambridge though as he implies that he went to Bart's which doesn't do intercalated years. Though for anyone who wants to write John + Sherlock at Uni can pair them up in supervisions (if they are in the same year) or you can just have them attend the same college and live on the same staircase.

[asahifirsa]

It's very interesting to read about medical education in the U.K. I myself studied medicine for three years before dropping out. In my country education was free and studies were not limited, which meant that classes were overrun and you could not get into courses because they were usually full with the waiting list from the year before. It was terrible really