Comprehensive care revisited.

Although the term comprehensive care has gone out of fashion in medical education, the concept has had a resurgence in attempts to teach primary care and family practice. Review of the early experiments in the teaching of comprehensive care in the 1950s reveals that much that was learned then is not being applied today. Surveys of medical school teaching and graduate training in primary care make it seem likely that there will be insufficient practitioners in the foreseeable future to meet the public need for personal physicians. Restructuring of both medical curricula and the delivery systems for personal health services may be necessary to apply effectively what has long been known about the teaching and practice of comprehensive primary care.