Edited by Daniel B. Stone, MB
The time is ripe, if not overdue, for a new kind of textbook on patient-interviewing and physical examination for those of us who are medical students of all ages. Just as publication of Osler's Principles and Practice of Medicine in 1892 not only marked a turning point in medical compendia, but heralded the Flexner revolution in American medical education, so does the present call for a break with the past in volumes on physical diagnosis. We may also hope that a new publication will promote a renaissance in this much-neglected discipline.
Like Osler's opus magnum, the modern textbook of patient examination will display certain reforming features. First would be a radical resection of the vast amount of material no longer, if ever, applicable, but annually recounted by generations of students in their final examinations, only to be promptly forgotten when they are on their