Medical truants
Medical truants

Summary/Abstract: Medical studies attracted a lot of students for centuries on end, but not always did the physicians take their first choice. Some of them came to develop other interests. Some others abandoned medicine and “donated” themselves to science, literature, art, law or politics (the real “truants”). Still other physicians continued to practice, but also performed in other fields. We will present a series of personalities with their, albeit scanty, biographical data, who became famous after fully abandoning medical or pharmaceutical studies, or after letting their medical career run down so as to become famous in cultural fields of choice. We will focus only on personalities in modern history (with only a few exceptions), in literature and arts for now, who decided to leave medicine for their passions; all of them became famous in other fields; we will also probe into some of the most frequent reasons for their abandon or neglect.

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