Faculty Bibliography

In June 1955, following his college graduation, David Halberstam tossed a suitcase into his banged-up Chevy and headed south to begin his journalistic career. His first job, at a small-town Mississippi newspaper, lasted less than a year. He was fired for publishing some freelance pieces sympathetic to the emerging civil rights movement. But he landed a position at The Nashville Tennessean, one of the region's most influential newspapers. Though Tennessee bordered the Deep South, racial repression there did not approach the levels of Mississippi and Alabama. The state's senators, Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver, had refused to sign the infamous "Southern Manfesto," which preached resistance to court-ordered integration, while Gov. Frank Clement had staked out a moderate position on racial issues. Nashville, the state capital, was home to several black colleges, the progressive Vanderbilt Divinity School and a newspaper that covered civil rights in an objective manner. It seemed a model of racial harmony. In 1959, the Vanderbilt Divinity School admitted two blacks as a token gesture, and Nashville would never be the same. One of these students was James Lawson, the key player in "The Children," Halberstam's powerful, densely packed, often unwieldy account of the "Nashville kids" who were instrumental in sparking the civil rights movement and helping to bring legal segregation to its knees. The son of an Ohio minister, Lawson went to Federal prison during the Korean War for refusing to register for the draft. Committed to the pacifist teachings of A. J. Muste, he worked for three years as a missionary in India, learning about nonviolent activism from Gandhi's disciples. Arriving in Nashville, Lawson supplemented his religious studies at Vanderbilt with a workshop designed to train local students for the struggle against racial injustice. He was, Halberstam notes, "as absolutely clear in his mission as he was of his own vision of what America should be."

PURPOSE: Although medical students are expected to adopt and practice the ideals stated in the Hippocratic Oath, little is known about whether these values are actually taught during clinical training. The purpose of this study was to examine the "recommended curriculum" of medical values and compare it with values that are actually taught. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The recommended curriculum was identified through content analysis of curriculum documents and interviews with individuals responsible for teaching. The taught curriculum of values was identified through naturalistic observations and audio taping of inpatient internal medicine teams at an academic medical center. RESULTS: The values most consistently recommended in the medical curriculum are honesty, accountability, compassion, the importance of public health, and self-policing. While accountability and caring were found frequently in the taught curriculum, self-policing and the importance of public health were emphasized less. Interprofessional respect and the importance of service were present in the recommended curriculum, but were taught as interprofessional disrespect and as the burden of service. The importance of industry (working hard) was not found in the recommended curriculum, but frequently identified in the taught curriculum. CONCLUSION: This study indicates that one reason medical students are not learning the intended norms of the profession may be that the teachers are not consistently teaching the recommended values of the profession. Future research should concentrate on confirming these findings in other settings and on understanding why these values are not consistently taught.