Physicians and alcoholics. The effect of medical training on attitudes toward alcoholics.

The over-all ratings assigned by first- and second-year medical students and housestaff (residents and interns) to alcoholics on a 16-adjectivee bipolar semantic differential measure differed significantly. Mean ratings by the housestaff were lowest and the ratings by the second-year students were lower than those of the first-year students on 5 of the 6 adjective pairs on which the groups differed significantly.