Engineering Medicine over the last 40 years There have been many milestones in the last century within engineering. A top 20 list of engineering millstones can be found at the website for The National Academy of Engineering. Many of those milestones, even something as commercial as refrigeration, have helped to shape modern medicine into the robust field it is today. Although engineering is often referenced to ancient history, for our purposes, engineering will be limited to the time when it became and academic pursuit and was based on mathematics and science. Engineering has made incremental and break-thru changes in the way medicine is practiced. However, one aspect of medical profession, a topic which still holds high value in the Hippocratic Oath taken by medical students upon matriculation, is how we te ach the next generation physician. Engineers have had an enormous impact on society’s daily lives and this has molded how physicians deliver medical education and training to each new generation of medical students. The movement towards using engineering technology as education tools in the medical school classroom has set-up the graduating medical school student for success Background: 40+ years ago I want to talk to you a bit about the evolution of the engineering profession in order to truly appreciate its impact and influence on other professions. The entrance of engineering into a structured school environment, within the U.S., was in the early 1800’s through West Point Military Academy as the first engineering school. The first U.S School to issue a civil engineering degree (any engineering degree) was with Renssealer
Polytechnic Institute(RPI) in 1835. However, engineering was not accepted well within the world of academia. In the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper a physicist, still feels this way in today’s society when he describes his attitude about Howard Walowitz, a Masters degreed engineer from MIT. Raj Koothrapolli: How are we going to make any modifications without Walowitz? Sheldon Cooper: Have faith gentlemen. We don’t need Walowitz. Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics. Watch and learn. However, through the focus of mathematics and science within the engineering curriculum did it gain acceptance from the traditional academic departments. Schools with engineering programs increased due to the acceptance and need of this profession for an ever growing population. With growth came branching of more disciplines. So what’s happened over the last 40 years: Within the last 40 years, major leaps in technology and the evolution of certain branches of engineering came about. From the early days of civil and mechanical engineering, there arose a need for a new discipline of electrical and electronic engineers. Computer engineering, once taught as an option for electronic engineering became it’ own discipline. Many of these