Editorial: Circumventing the Time Warp in Health Professions

Abstract

Sometime in 1970, I had a conversation with a retired expatriate pathologist, working in the Ministry
of Health, Kenya on contract. On learning that I was a new lecturer in pharmacology, University of
Nairobi, he volunteered his views on the subject. I learnt that he was an alumnus of Cambridge
University, England. A quick mental calculation placed him in his early 60s, which meant he had
studied medicine in Cambridge in the 1930s, long before the first antibiotic, penicillin, was put to
clinical use. He complained that he found pharmacology a difficult subject during his undergraduate
studies. Needless to say, what he was calling pharmacology was “materia medica”, a study of material
and substances used in medicine, their names, sources, physical characteristics and chemical
properties, their preparations and dosages. He could recall such drugs as “tincture of digitalis”,
“belladonna with antacids” and “Ipecacuanha”. A quick review of literature shows that the majority of
drugs (over 95%) were discovered after 1950. So what did the learned doctor study at Cambridge?