By chris
In many ways, medical residencies are relics of ancient times when doctors were urgently needed by armies. Doctoral candidates needed to be exposed to the potential rigors of suddenly having masses of casualties dumped on your doorstep. Here, you would simply have to keep going for days on end without rest or sleep as long as your services were needed. People who were not physically or psychologically able to stand this level of extreme medical burnout needed to be weeded out before an emergency arose.
That legacy of superachievement lives on in modern doctoral training regimes, although it is much less likely that the sort of tidal wave of blood will ever show up again. Still, in some fashion, it is comforting to know that your future family physician has been pre-stressed from the factory and is not going to melt down in an emergency.
