“You’re going into anesthesia? Well, I guess you’re going to have to forget everything you’ve learned.” This is a remark I received recently from an attending physician when he asked what my plans were for upcoming residency applications. Not two weeks later, at the ANESTHESIOLOGY™2013 annual meeting in San Francisco, past ASA president Mark Warner, M.D. addressed the ASA Medical Student Component and shared his opinion that anesthesiology is the only specialty in medicine where one gets to routinely utilize everything learned in medical training.
Why are there such disparate views on anesthesiology? Perhaps part of the answer lay in a speech given in 1950 by renowned anesthesiologist Emanuel M. Papper, M.D.:
Evidently, this dichotomous view of anesthesiology has been around for years, and the advances in medicine and anesthesia since 1950 are astounding. The “kind of knowledge that the anesthesiologist has at his command” has simply grown exponentially.
The...