2«* S. Vn. Jan, 8. '69. ;) 



NOTES ANt) QUERIES. 



23 



* * * Nous nous embarquames de nouveau, et aprfes 

 deux jours, nous arrivames h, Pile des Oiseaux, qui est d£- 

 pourviie de population. Nous jetames I'ancre, nous mon- 

 tames dans File, et nous la trouvames remplie d'oiseaux 

 ressemblant aux moineaux, mais plus gros que ceux-ci. 

 Les gens du navire appart^rent des ceufs, les firent cuire 

 et les mangferent. lis se mirent h chasser ces memes 

 oiseaux, et en prlrent un bon nombre, qu'ils firent cuire 

 aussi, sans les avoir pr^alablement ^gorg^s, et ils les 

 mangferent. II y avait, assis h mon cdt4, un marchand de 

 I'ile de Massirah, qui habitait Zafar, et done le nom ^tait 

 Moslim. Je le vis manger ces oiseaux avec les matelots, 

 et je lui reprochai une telle action. II en fut tout hon- 

 teux. et il me r^pondit : ' Je croyais qu'ils leur avaient 

 coupe la gorge.' Aprfes cela, il se tint ^loign^ de moi, par 

 I'eflfet de la honte, et il ne m'approchait que lorsque je 

 I'appelais." 



The " He des Oiseaux " was one of the Kooria- 

 Mooria group ; and it will be seen from Ibn Ba- 

 tuta's description that, in addition to being situated 

 in an almost rainless region, these islands present 

 the other conditions essential to the presence of 

 guano — a multitudinous resort of sea- fowl, and a 

 destitution of other living inhabitants. 



J. Emerson Tennent. 



MEDICINE. 



The year just expired is the aera of a very con- 

 siderable change in the medical arrangements of 

 the country, which has been made almost without 

 notice. Attention enough has been directed to 

 the medical act as a whole, to its machinery for 

 preventing fraudulent assumption of titles, to its 

 new Medical Council, to the hardship of making 

 established practitioners pay a heavy fee for being 

 written down in a book. Nor have the lighter 

 features of the subject been neglected : it has been 

 duly noticed that there is a clause under which the 

 medical man is enabled to recover, but that there 

 is no such clause for the patient, who is left in this 

 matter to the doctor's discretion, as heretofore. But 

 the great recognition of private judgment, and the 

 downfall of collegiate authority, has hardly ob- 

 tained a passing notice, even from the colleges 

 themselves. 



It has always been taken that the aspirant for 

 a medical diploma, in answering the questions pro- 

 posed to him, was showing belief as well as knoW' 

 ledge : without binding himself to every detail, 

 he was considered as holding, in the main, by the 

 system under which he had been educated, and as 

 engaging to regulate his practice accordingly. 

 And thus it has several times happened, of late 

 years, that candidates who have been known to 

 intend to follow a path, or pathy, different from 

 that of the colleges, have either been refused their 

 diplomas, or have been abused as fraudulent per- 

 sons in the medical journals. All excuse for this 

 kind of charge is now at an end. The recent me- 

 dical act empowers the Privy Council to deprive 



of its function any examining body which, after 

 one warning from the Medical Council, shall per- 

 sist in making the examination or the certificate a 

 test of belief in any medical or surgical theory. 

 From the history of the repeated attempts to ob- 

 tain a medical bill, it appears that, in the early 

 stages, there was a strong disposition on the part 

 of the profession to try to make all that they call 

 quackery illegal and punishable ; that in the later 

 stages there was a conviction that any such at- 

 tempt was hopeless, and that all that could be 

 successfully proposed would be the punishment of 

 those who should announce themselves under false 

 titles. This reasonable measure has been carried. 

 Again, in several of the later bills, a clause has 

 been inserted prohibiting any medical or surgical 

 opinion from "being made a ground of expulsion 

 from the profession : but nothing so strong as the 

 clause above alluded to was ever hinted at before. 

 This clause was not in the bill sent up by the Com- 

 mons : it was introduced in the Lords without ex- 

 citing any public attention. It was then received 

 in the Commons with a remark that it was meant 

 for the protection of homoeopathy, and a laugh ; 

 and so it passed. Never before was a principle 

 upset so easily. 



All bodies which are deprived of the power of 

 imposing opinion and belief gain at least as much 

 as those who are relieved of their control. In the 

 present instance, what is called regular education 

 becomes morally imperative upon those who intend 

 to follow what is called irregular practice. In the 

 times gone by, one who was to be a quack might 

 reasonably object to frequent a medical school : 

 he might be deterred by the feeling that he 

 would be supposed to be making a fraudulent use 

 of the teaching of that school. But no such im- 

 pediment now exists, even to his presenting him- 

 self for examination. The anatomy, the physio- 

 logy, the surgery, the diagnosis of disease, the 

 chemistry, and the materia medica, of the existing 

 schools, are requisite to be known by the fol- 

 lowers of all systems. The practice of medicine, 

 or mode of treating disease, is the only field of 

 difference. Until regular schools are founded for 

 the education of medical dissenters, it will be 

 difficult to believe in the competency of any per- 

 son who has not sought the common knowledge in 

 those which already exist. To which it must be 

 added, that in no other way can the noncon- 

 formist produce sufficient proof that he has given 

 to the system which has time and numbers in its 

 favour all that time and numbers can demand in 

 our day — attentive examination. 



The old distinction of regular and irregular 

 practitioner — regular medical man and quack — 

 call it what you will, which the law has now put in 

 course of abolition, dates from the old Egyptians. 

 This distinction, as we all know, consists in fol- 

 lowing or not following a course laid down by 



