Medical education in Bangladesh - past, present and future

Abstract

Through its journey from the prehistoric era, medicine has evolved itself into a social system heavily bureaucratized and politicized and truly commercialized. Medical education has also traversed a long way from the ancient medicine in India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece to the middle ages and finally to the present day medicine. The explosion of knowledge during the last two centuries has made medicine more complex and rendered medical education more and more difficult. And more difficult is to take the benefit of medical knowledge to the common people and truly to the disadvantaged communities. Let us think of our old traditional medicine. Usually, a disciple learnt from his / her teacher (guru /ostad) and served as a philanthropist and the physician’s position was “next to God”. The days are gone. Colonization made a great change in our medicinal practice. We lost our glory of contribution to medical science by the celebrated authorities – Atreya, Charaka, Susrata and Vagbhatt. We lost our glory as history goes, in the time of East India Company, the British physicians learnt the art of rhinoplasty and the instruments for microsurgery, then widely used in India.