Students are assigned to the medical wards for ten-week periods. Time is divided between the Vanderbilt Hospital, St. Thomas Hospital, and the Veterans Administration Hospital. The clinical clerkship is regarded as the backbone of the student's training in medicine and represents the most intensive inpatient experience offered within the department. It is believed that learning is most vivid through direct experience with patients, obtaining histories, doing physicals and laboratory studies, and that it is amplified by reading and intensive contact with members of the house staff and teaching staff. Students are given considerable responsibility under close supervision of the teaching staff.
Additional instruction is carried out during rounds with the chief of service.
In these sessions, clinical clerks present cases for discussion and criticism and the more important fields of internal medicine are covered. Ward work is supplemented by numerous teaching and subspecialty conferences held throughout the academic year. Leonard, Newman, Johnson, and staff of the Department of Medicine 520. Spickard, Gigante, and staff.