Kenneth M. Ludmerer – författare

The recipient of extraordinary critical acclaim, this magisterial book provides a landmark account of American medical education in the twentieth century, concluding with a call for the reformation of a system currently handicapped by managed care and by narrow, self-centred professional interests.Kenneth M. Ludmerer describes the evolution of American medical education from 1910, when a muck-raking report on medical diploma mills spurred the reform and expansion of medical schools, to the current era of managed care, when commercial interests once more have come to the fore, compromising the training of the nation's future doctors. Ludmerer portrays the experience of learning medicine from the perspective of students, house officers, faculty, administrators, and patients, and he traces the immense impact on academic medical centres of outside factors such as World War II, the National Institutes of Health, private medical insurance, and Medicare and Medicaid. Most notably, the book explores the very real threats to medical education in the current environment of managed care, viewing these developments not as a catastrophe but as a challenge to make many long overdue changes in medical education and medical practice.Panoramic in scope, meticulously researched, brilliantly argued, and engagingly written, Time to Heal is both a stunning work of scholarship and a courageous critique of modern medical education. The definitive book on the subject, it provides an indispensable framework for making informed choices about the future of medical education and health care in America.

In Let Me Heal, prize-winning author Kenneth M.Ludmerer provides the first-ever account of the residency system for training doctors in the United States and, by tracing its evolution, explores how the residency system is of fundamental importance to the health of the nation. In the making of a doctor, the residency system represents the dominant formative influence. It is during the three to nine years spent in residency that doctors come of professional age, acquiring the knowledge and skills of their specialty or subspecialty, forming a professional identify, and developing habitts, behaviors, attitudes, and values that last a professional lifetime. Let Me Heal examines all dimensions of the residency system: historical evolution, educational principles, moral underpinnings, financing and administration, and cultural components. It focuses on the experience of being a resident, on how that experience has changed over time, and on how well the residency system is fulfilling its obligation to produce outstanding doctors. Most importantly, it analyzes the mutual relationship beetween residency education and patient care in America. The book shows that the quality of residency training ultimately depends on the quality of patient care that residents observe, but that there is much that residency training can do to produce doctors who practice in a better, more affordable fashion.