INTRODUCTORY SURVEY 173 



rare morbid conditions and symptoms. They have been 

 masters of the arts of clinical observation and description. 

 This interest in the actual, in seeing things as they are 

 through one's own eyes, is of all qualities the most im- 

 portant for the practitioner of medicine. It consorts ill 

 with the tendency of the compiler, who laboriously 

 gathers from other sources than his own experience all 

 existing knowledge, and, systematizing it, makes it avail- 

 able for the mass of men. He is the bookkeeper of 

 science, useful but uninspiring. The infinite variety of 

 the expressions of disease in the individual has at times 

 led the French school to erect unnecessary distinctions; 

 but, in spite of occasional excesses, its keen discrimina- 

 tions have been the means of detecting many unsuspected 

 clinical syndromes. Because of this fundamental interest 

 in the concrete, French medical students have always 

 entered the hospitals from the very beginning of their 

 course, and have seen sick patients during the years in 

 which they were mastering anatomy, physiology, and the 

 other underlying medical sciences. 



Finally, that passion for the mastery of his language 

 as a vehicle for thought, which is so strong in the French- 

 man, has lent ,to his medical teaching and to the pub- 

 lication of his scientific work a clarity, elegance, and charm 

 which are rarely equalled in any other country. To the 

 earnest student of medicine the manner in which he 

 clothes his ideas can never be of small consequence; and 

 the example which will be constantly before him as he 

 listens to the presentation of a case in the hospital ward, 

 or to the announcement in a few concise and telling words 

 of an important discovery at a meeting of the Societe de 

 Biologic or the Societe des Hopitaux, will be one worthy of 

 emulation. 



In modern science, machinery and method have of late 

 almost obscured from view that hidden, but essential, 



