Who Worked in Health Care?

A Typical Medical Student/Physician.

By 1979 a record 63,800 students were enrolled in medical schools. The first-year medical student was typically a white male between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. (Men accounted for 74.7 percent of the medical student body.) He came from an upper- or upper-middle-class family and was likely to have a parent or close relative who was a physician. He had at least a bachelor's degree with a 3.4 (on a 4.0 scale) premedical grade point average. Most likely his undergraduate college major was in biology, chemistry, zoology, premedicine, or psychology. While women made up 25.3 percent of medical students by the end of the decade (an increase of almost 16 percent), they remained a mere 10 percent of practicing physicians. In 1979-1980, 5.7 percent of the students enrolled in medical school were African-Americans, a considerable increase over ten or twenty years before. U.S. medical schools...

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