"Professional competence or obsolescence--which?

A GOOD DOCroR NEVER GRADUATES! MAY I present Dr. Obsolescing Smith and Dr. Competent Smith ? Both are qualified and registered to practise the healing art on the basis of existing legal requirements. Fifteen years ago both completed the first phase of their medical education and received their respective medical degrees. Dr. 0. Smith graduated finally and irrevocably. With joyous abandon he severed, for good and all, the shackles of further learning and study. Now, fifteen years later, his few medical books of graduation vintage remain unopened, gathering dust on display in his consulting room for his patients to observe and be duly impressed by their appearance of seeming weighty erudition. He subscribes to no medical journals. He attends no scientific medical meetings. He never enters a hospital to care for a patient; and to enrol in a postgraduate refresher course would never enter his head. The advances of modern medicine have long since passed him by and left him a beached, derelict hulk of professional obsolescence. By contrast, Dr. C. Smith, the up-to-date, scholarly, compassionate, interested, available, unhurried, painstaking, competent doctor, has never really graduated. It is true that he enjoyed a memorable, pleasant, academic ceremony in thc presence of the hierarchy of the university medical school establishment resplendent in their colourful robes, but for him that moment in time was just the beginning of the next phase of his medical education the forty-year long continuum of