Is this "internship" or not to "internship"?

What can I say from the perspective of 51 years after graduation about empowerment? First, that everything that turned out to be practical was theoretical during the course of study. It was the knowledge of basic sciences that allowed me to keep up with and participate in the progress of practical medicine. Practical medicine during my studies is largely the history of medicine today. And what we teach today as a practice will be history in a few years' time. The point is that our successors should be able to learn the medicine of the future, already being doctors. They can't do it without basic science.

Secondly, that everything that is practical and useful from other fields of medicine than the one that I have practiced through my life has been learned during my postgraduate internship. The basic difference between a 6-year-old student and a trainee doctor is that the first one does not have legal personality and can only look, usually in a group of several people, and the trainee already has (although limited) but the right to practice and is alone in his/her profession. guardian. And if he wants, he can learn a lot of practical activities from him. I don't know who I would be and what I would have been able to do if it wasn't for the postgraduate internship.

My tutor in surgery was Bronek Stawarz, who said: you will keep hooks for yourself, but come with me to the clinic and I will teach you a little surgery. But I also held the hooks, and thanks to that I knew how to navigate the operating room when 13 years later I was developing a method of harvesting bone marrow for transplantation. Kazio Sułek was my tutor on the internally, and after hours he was teaching me how to evaluate the marrow. It was my leaven for being a hematologist. I was led by Jurek Stelmachów in gynecology, who allowed me to deliver the child by myself during the shift. Years later, this allowed me to enter the delivery room and develop a method of collecting umbilical cord blood for transplantation. Finally, in pediatrics, I came across Dr. Maria Ochocka by accident, who was treating childhood leukemia. Twelve years later, thanks to her recommendations of the first patients for bone marrow transplantation, I was sent to interns by pediatric hematologists. She remembered me from that internship. Of course, I was lucky with mentors - they all became professors later. And finally there was "real life" - independent duty hours in the emergency room and home visits at the clinic in Mariańska Street. But wherever I was, I tried to do what I could.

This is some kind of phantasmagoria that 6th year students walking around the clinic will learn some practical medicine. Practice is what you can do with your own hands. INTERNSHIP!