Depth as well as breadth for postgraduate education.

There was a request recently to categorise aspects of postgraduate medical education as either "academic" or "vocational." This raises a question about the meaning of words and about the logic behind such a distinction. In common parlance "academic" means impracticable and irrelevant to the real business of living. A "vocation" was once a calling to the higher rungs of a profession but now "vocational" describes the more humdrum aspects of practical instruction in the branch of medicine in which a student hopes to earn his living. "Postgraduate" is indiscriminately applied to students with widely disparate intentions and at many stages of their career, to deans and to tutors, to medical centres, and to hospitals and institutes, as well as to courses of instruction. Now, however, as the demand grows for standardised programmes of postgraduate training and the competition for scarce resources sharpens, we should be more precise about our meaning and