21ST CENTURY MEDICAL EDUCATION IN UNIVERSITY OF MALAYA

Abstract

Over one hundred years ago, Sir William Osler, took up the Chair as the Regius Professor of Medicine
at Oxford, after distinguished careers as professor in medicine at McGill University in Montreal, the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was a superb clinical and a great teacher, and will be remembered for his contributions to medicine, including the establishment of medical residency programmes. He insisted that students learned from seeing and talking to patients, rather than just from dry didactic lectures as was the traditional teaching method of the time. And in referring to continuing medical education, he said, 'The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under a teacher is
but a preparation