It's very useful to be capable to do that quickly if you can recall it off the top of your head, as you'd be able to more fluidly connect the information into the argument without all that task switching overhead from going back to Google every couple minutes.
Let alone the issue of the information needing to be available in the first place! How would you know what you don't know? Wouldn't you be a lot less likely to forget if you memorized?
I find medical textbooks have significantly improved over the years at their capacity for organizing their finds both functionally and hierarchically. But we can't really put these findings in terms of their compiler, the laws of physics; you don't get unity except by association of the lower level facts with their referrers.
Additionally, discovery in the modern medical field cycles from inductive to abductive to deductive reasoning ad nauseam, in particular by associating diseases together from common molecular components. Your brain will be incapable of having these insights spontaneously without having them internally to percolate.
Medicine is basically all rote memorization, from pre-Med to the MCAT. It makes sense to select for doctors who are good at it, because they need to have a quickly queryable, but wide breadth of knowledge in their head at all times.
Personally I’m happy to know that my doctor is able to memorize and collate so much information. But I do worry that the way he learns may also restrict his creativity and problem solving.
Perhaps as AI moves into medicine, doctors won’t need to rely so much on their own memorization, and can focus their efforts on problem solving.
Here is a link to example patient cases, which may help to see what kind of knowledge is useful. I was not trying to say it is all useless, when I had to solve sample cases e.g. in Medical Neuroscience (Coursera, huge course, great teacher) it sure helps to know the major pathways, and it would take too much time to have to look them up when the patient is in front of you.
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/results.as...
Having taught many med students, I say this attitude would have been a good start towards being a great doctor.
I tend to joke that if a doctor discovered a keyboard he would name it a negra quadrodepressus-hectomatrix. Accurate.. and semantically useless. That's how you name things when you have no clue about it's function.
And medicine likes its superbly tough anatomical projection/cut of internals. Honestly I find it's a miracle how doctors can look at organs in every angle and still find their way (same for radiologists).
Coming from CS with a taste for multistage compilation and the likes, I find no beauty in anatomy.. I need a little more principles and less description.
For a CS graduate, it's like learning everything there is about Oracle 9i. For years. By heart. Not even about databases in general, you learn the basics of course, but then you spend most of your time learning by heart every command and every setting of Oracle 9i.
I'm sure it makes you an efficient doctor within the given system, and when trying to solve some example cases there sure is value in knowing pathways (real ones, e.g. neurological ones - where is the damage if the patient feels this and does not feel any of that?, as well as biochemical ones, but also organizational stuff like various ways invented to categorize broken bones, e.g. http://www.thieme.com/media/samples/pubid1252333231.pdf). Quite frankly, I find most of it a waste of time.
Right now I'm re-taking edX "Principles of Biochemistry" (https://www.edx.org/course/principles-biochemistry-harvardx-...), and while it's a lot of fun I also feel it's quite a bit of a waste: From part III on it feels more and more useless. The course is done very well, and every bit is interesting, but how - WHY - am I supposed to learn soooo many paths in such great detail? What's the point? If I need it I can always look it up! No wonder that while there are several "Hello I'm new here, excited to start this course" messages in the forum every day there are only a handful of forum messages for the later sections of the course - after many months of running. I suspect >90% of people never get past part 3 (of 5). Because the brain just does not see the point of all this rote learning. If there was a larger project as context, a problem to solve! But just "here learn this" for no other reason than "it's interesting" (so are a trillion other pieces of information!!)... it does not work very well.
Learning needs both a PUSH and a PULL. The teaching is mostly about push(ing knowledge into brains), but where is the pull (reasons other than abstract "you need to know")? Brain have their own ways of detecting actual need, and that comes from having to solve actual problems, not from being told "this is important". And learning millions of facts when you don't need them but know you can always learn them/look them up quickly at any time when you do actually need them is soooo demotivating.