Chapter 85
- Teaching Anesthesia
- Alan Jay Schwartz
"Pedantic" is a description teachers wish to avoid. In the interest
of doing so, I offer a fifth grader's biography of the great teacher Socrates[1]
:
Socrates was a man.
Socrates was a Greek.
Socrates went around telling people what to do.
They poisoned him!
This chapter on anesthesia education is not intended in such a
manner that I risk Socrates' fate, but rather it is intended to be provocative, to
give cause for thought to an important subject not often reflected on. All anesthesia
education can be easily considered in the following question (Greenhow DE: personal
communication, 1982):
How shall who teach what to whom for what purpose now and in the future?!
Anesthesia education is presented by using this question as the
framework for consideration. This chapter provides a philosophy of teaching anesthesia
rather than a detailed account of the many aspects of anesthesia education (e.g.,
operating room anesthesia versus critical care medicine versus cardiopulmonary resuscitation
versus chronic pain management).
