Depression era medical school

[tamtrible]

time: shortly before ww2 place: somewhere in the United States (not quite Real World, but functionally equivalent) search terms: depression era medical school, with and without appropriate quotes

Comments

[aliskye]

This might have some useful information:

http://www.lib.odu.edu/special/oralhistory/womenhistory/khillpaper.html

This one isn't an American but might be interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/53/a3890153.shtml

And here's someone from Canada :)

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/locallegends/Biographies/Montgomery_Smith_Jeanne.html

There might be some info here:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/

[tamtrible]

Not quite the answers I need, but some information that might help, thank you.

[slashfairy]

search terms US medical schools 1930
US medical education 1930s
US doctor training 1930s
age at graduation from high school 1930s

might be some things in these pages to help or guide you.

Thanks, somewhat helpful...

[tamtrible]

looks like it answers part but not all of my question. It looks like it can reasonably take her 7 years from entering college to walking out with her shiny new medical degree. I just can't quite figure out the minimum time between said shiny new degree and the army letting her cut people up on the battle front, and roughly what would happen between the two by way of experience/additional training.

But, thank you. I should've thought of those, I was having a slow brain day.

Re: Thanks, somewhat helpful...

[slashfairy]

currently fourth year med students assist with surgery, perform some procedures under supervision, etc. the last year is about the medical school knowing the new doctor will be safe to turn loose in the world with stethoscope and scalpel.

if she's on the front lines, and it's battlezone conditions, she'll be doing things pretty early on. remember there was no idea of 'the golden hour of trauma medicine'; people just died from a lot of things- infection, bad broken bones; lung disease; blood loss; appendicitis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, polio all killed people in large numbers.

you could research term sets like'medical care at the front (this one's for WWI)' and 'intern surgeon 1930s' or intern surgeon practice 1930s. there weren't antibiotics besides sulfa powder, there weren't volume expanders to use in lieu of blood, there weren't pressors to keep blood pressure up- there weren't mechanical ventilators. there weren't real ambulance societies except in big cities, and in war it could take all day to get a man from the front back

Re: Thanks, somewhat helpful...

[tamtrible]

I'll have to stare at these more when I'm not theoretically working...

[gallo_de_pelea]

Ferrol Sams' book The Whisper of the River is a thinly veiled autobiography of a med student in the mid-late thirties. It might be worth checking out. It's the second book in a trilogy; I forget the name of the third, but it follows him serving as a medic in France and Italy during WWII.

It's been about 15 years since I read it, but I remember there being a lot of random sex and weird racist moments, just so you know.

[tamtrible]

I'll have to decide how much research I'm willing to put in to a roleplaying character [g]

I looked at some links a friend sent me

[tamtrible]

In case anyone besides me is researching this.
can't find the actual links, Facebook ate them...
I'll likely send her to the UK for her medical degree, since there it's not a post-graduate degree, or at least wasn't at the time. And, if I understand things correctly, she could get hired by the (war-time) Brit military pretty much fresh out of school. There may've been some sort of internship in there, but there was an account of a 23-year-old Navy medical type, so... 25-and-already-experienced should be no trouble at all.
Though she'll have to be 18 to *go* to medical school, looks like.