When I applied for a surgery residency, only one professor asked me questions about my manual dexterity. He asked if I played a musical instrument (I had but not well) and whether I worked with tools. I had been working with tools since I was a child. One of my earliest memories was smashing my thumb with a hammer. When I was a medical student, we had real labs. In Physiology and Pharmacology we would inject rabbits with drugs and measure the effect. Sometimes we constructed preparations with a frog’s leg and its nerve. Sometimes it was a heart beating in a dish of nutrient solution.
In recent years, some students have begun to complain about the use of animals in research and in biology labs. The lab benches have disappeared from medical schools. Students don’t even use microscopes anymore. I wonder if an applicant to a surgery program is asked about manual dexterity now.
This essay discusses the disappearance of shop class in high school (my Catholic high school didn’t have shop) and the decline of the manual arts as vocational choices. A Mercedes mechanic can earn $150,000 a year in a dealership position but college graduates earning 14 dollars an hour will look upon him as a “blue-collar worker.” The essay points out that many of the people described in the book, “The Millionaire Next Door” are in fact the products of such technical trades.
It has been said that India was for many years held back in its development because the British educational system had left a tradition of contempt for such manual trades. India had plenty of doctors but few auto mechanics. I wonder if we are headed the same way?