Word: tosteson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spent most of the '50s working as a research fellow in various labs, starting at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1951, and working at different times in Copenhagen, Denmark and Cambridge, England. After 1958 Tosteson quickly worked his way up through the ranks of academic medicine, becoming a professor and chairman of the departments of physiology and pharmacology at the Duke University School of Medicine in 1961. While at Duke he became involved in national research groups and physicians' organizations, and served as chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges...
After all of these positions and activities, a deanship was a logical next step. In 1975, he accepted the University of Chicago's offer. As Tosteson notes, "The reward for a job well done is another job." But there was still one more job in the offing. When last fall Tosteson accepted President Bok's offer of appointment to his alma mater, Harvard Medical School, the president of the University of Chicago quickly relieved Tosteson of his posts at Chicago, citing "the potential conflicts of interest in Dr. Tosteson's position as dean-designate of the Harvard Medical School...
...Tosteson is still involved in talking and listening here, feeling out the Med School's faculty in general terms before he begins to discuss specific programs. But if Tosteson is anything like Ebert, he has plans. Shortly after Ebert became dean of the Medical School in 1965 he began work on setting up the Harvard Community Health Plan, a health maintenance organization that would emphasize primary and preventive care--a progressive shift in emphasis not especially easy to implement, given the Med School's largely conservative faculty. Most analysts of the U.S. health care system view the shift...
...innovations for enhancing primary care were a pet project of Ebert, the issue that puts an eager glint in Tosteson's eye is innovation in teaching. Tosteson points out that "the amount of information potentially relevant to the work of a physician, considering the broad spectrum of roles possible, is infinite for all practical purposes." "I take 'teaching' to mean promoting, encouraging and catalyzing learning," he says. "I do not believe that verb means transferring from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the student some bits" of information, he adds...
Real learning, Tosteson says, involves acquiring the ability "to get at what you need to know when you need to know it." Most important in medical education is development of "the desire, the will to learn," a quality that would once have been called "character...