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Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005;159:887-889.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In his memoirs, the physician-scientist Lewis Thomas remembered how the teaching at Harvard Medical School (Boston, Mass) in 1933 focused on diagnosis and prognosis because there was little that therapeutics could offer. The task of the physician was to make an accurate diagnosis and then explain its implications to the patient and family: " . . . [I]t gradually dawned on us that we didn’t know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing. . . . "^1(p29) Then a revolution occurred, heralded by the introduction of sulfanilamide to treat septicemia:

The phenomenon was almost beyond belief. . . . The professionals most deeply affected by these extraordinary events were, I think, the interns. . . . We had been raised to be ready for one kind of profession, and sensed that the profession itself had changed at the moment of our entry.^1(p35)

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Harold B. Siden, MD, MHSc

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