Prologue: The nations medical education enterprise has grown dramatically over the past fifteen years, thanks to federal policies that encouraged its expansion. This federal initiative led to an increase in the number of medical schools from 86 to 127 and a increase in medical school enrollment from 21,379 in 1960-61 to 67,016 in 1984-85. In the middle of this era, Dr. Robert H. Ebert, who at the time was dean of the Harvard Medical School, wrote an article in which he made some predictions on the future shape of graduate medical education. Now, some twelve years later, Ebert returns to that earlier work to ponder the accuracy of his forecast. Ebert predicted in his earlier article, published in the Scientific American in 1973, that medical education and medical practice were on the threshold of a new era, one in which external forces would come to play a far more influential role in their affairs. Ebert notes that change did not come nearly as rapidly as he anticipated, but that he still believes that ma...