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This article discusses the development of premedical and preclinical education in the Netherlands between 1865, when the ‘unity of licensure’ was achieved, and 1965, a year which marked the beginning of a series of innovations which resulted in a complete overhaul of the classical medical curriculum. It will be argued that Dutch premedical and preclinical education during the century between 1865 and 1965 was featured by a comprehensive treatment of the natural and preclinical sciences in order to provide students with a ‘solid foundation’ upon which their clinical knowledge and, eventually, their clinical competence should be built. However, the curriculum suffered from several major shortcomings: it was educationally insufficient, it lacked internal dynamics, it was extremely compartmentalized, and it became increasingly overloaded. As a consequence of both rigid legislation and an obsolete educational philosophy, these curricular shortcomings could not adequately be dealt with. Consequently, in the early 1960s, when the number of medical students exploded, the curriculum more or less imploded under its own weight. New legislation and the foundation of two new medical schools in the 1960s and 1970s, which could design their curriculum almost ‘from scratch,’ finally paved the way for implementing the major curricular innovations at the time already long overdue. Development and organization of medical education in the Netherlands Nineteenth-century academic medical education in the Netherlands closely resembled that in Germany, the Nordic countries, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland, where it had developed from the work of lecturing university professors in the Middle Ages. In the second half of the 17 century and the first decades of the 18 century, Dutch medical schools ranked at the top of contemporary medical education; for example, Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) was not only an excellent clinical teacher, but also developed the direct precursor of the ‘discipline-based curriculum,’ later adopted by many American medical schools as well, which dominated medical education until the 1970s. Boerhaave’s ideal curriculum consisted of a premedical phase (dedicated to mathematics and natural sciences), a preclinical phase (which featured animal and human dissection, post-mortem examinations, artificially produced diseases in animals, and knowledge of medicines) and finally a clinical phase, in which the student would be allowed at the bedside. After Boerhaave’s death, his system of clinical education gradually passed into disuse, and by the early 19th century, the French and English medical faculties had widely surpassed the Dutch. Like elsewhere, there was at the time in the Netherlands an extensive ‘second class’ of medical practitioners, predominantly trained by apprenticeship or at so-called ‘Clinical Schools’: rural and urban surgeons, rural and urban general practitioners, physicians who were only allowed to practice on board of ships or in the army, and midwives. The academically educated physicians, on the other hand, did not consider themselves primarily as practitioners, but rather as learned and well-educated gentlemen, who tried to stay away as far as possible from the more unsavory aspects of medical practice, such as direct physical examination of a patient. Instead, their preferred actions were hearing the patient’s story and, on this basis, prescribing complex and expensive recipes for wealthy clients (the proverbial ‘gilded pills’). If cutting