In Perth

Visited the medical school I attended (1987-1992) and the hospital I worked for 2 years (1993-1994) on October 12, 2006.

What has a medical education meant to me?

Well, when I first graduated, it was all about the prestige of being a doctor, and which high-security, bank-rolling profession I should venture into. But with more wisdom over the years I guess my perspective has changed.

I guess now is to have a considered view of future goals, an ethical attitude towards fiancial rewards and a balanced perspective of the financial interest of those whom which we deal with.

Reflection

Many of the modern medicine and anatomical science as we know it originated from Greece in the likes of Hippocrates and Galen.

Willaim Harvey in 1616 demonstrated how blood flowed in one direction. He was highly criticised as it was against conventional wisdom then.

Antoine Lavoisier in the late 1700's published the concepts of metabolism, nutrition and exercise physiology. He supplied basic truths: only oxygen participates in animal respiration, and the "caloric" liberated during respiration is itself the source of combustion. He also proved that respiration produced carbon dioxide and water. However, his findings fundmental to our understanding of energy balance and metabolism, were not only rejected but cost him his life. The Jacobean tribunal beheaded him in 1974.

We are fortunate to have all the insight of those before us.

As Payne who wrote in 1896:

"No kind of knowledge has ever sprung into being without an antecedent, but is inseperably connected with what was known before... We are led back to Aristotle and Galen as the real predecessors of Harvey in his work concerning the heart. It was the labors of the great school of Greek anatomists... that the problem though unsolved, was put into shape that the genius of Harvey was enabled to solve it....The moral is, I think that the influence of the past on the present is even more potent than we commonly suppose. In common and trivial things, we may ingnore this connection; in what is of enduring worth we cannot."