3o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



some ranking with the best in the world, others periodically raided by 

 the police. 



Our democratic custom is to let every school shift for itself. In 

 the eyes of the law, every doctor is a doctor, if he has earned or bought 

 a diploma somewhere — herb-doctor, corn-doctor, faith-healer, electric- 

 healer, all kinds of healers, pass as doctors, and the people must choose 

 for themselves. 



Doubtless science wins in the long run. The honest school and 

 the honest man are the final winners, but there is a prodigious amount 

 of waste and suffering before the public knows the difference between 

 surgeons and bloodsuckers. 



More and more the honest medical schools are brought into touch 

 with the university. Around the university the tested educational 

 machinery tends to center. Sound instruction in medicine demands a 

 broad base of science — physiology, anatomy, chemistry, histology, bac- 

 teriology and above all the methods of scientific research. All these 

 are fundamental to any real knowledge of the art of medicine. All 

 these are essentials in the work of the modern university. The medical 

 school is giving these up to the institutions which can teach them for 

 their own sake, and therefore teach them better. This change shortens 

 the medical course, by making it longer, by placing it on a broader and 

 higher foundation. The medical school, then, teaches the application 

 of science, the science itself being studied elsewhere. There is a 

 tendency toward an easy transition from the one to the other, so that 

 the student can not tell when he began to study medicine. 



In the old days the transition was abrupt, and the medical student 

 learned applications of science before he had the faintest idea of 

 science itself. He was thrown at once into a topsy-turvy world, where 

 decencies did not count, where grewsome honors were everyday affairs, 

 and where all ordinary restraints were cast aside. Hence he kept his 

 tobacco in the skull of a murderer, wore a resurrection bone for a 

 scarf-pin, and was the most reckless, lawless, irreverent of all students, 

 careless of temperance, sanitation and chastity. Of all students, 

 thirty years ago, the medical student had deservedly the reputation 

 of being the worst. 



Leaving out ill-equipped or temporary schools, the American 

 medical school of the future will have one or the other of two great 

 purposes. The one is typified perhaps by the Medical School of Michi- 

 gan. It will take the profession as it is and raise it as a whole. So 

 many men will be doctors, so many will be lawyers in Michigan. Let 

 us take them as we find them and make them just as good lawyers and 

 doctors as we can. Let us not drive them away by requirements they 

 can not or will not meet, but adjust the work and conditions to the 



