XII ox MEDICAL EDUCATIOX 315 



is almost impossible that he can perform it 

 thoroughly and well. But if it be hardly possible 

 for a man to pursue anatomy without actually 

 breaking with his profession, how is it possible for 

 him to pursue physiology? 



I get every year those very elaborate reports of 

 Henle and Meissner — volumes of, I suppose, 400 

 pages altogether — and they consist merely of 

 abstracts of the memoirs and works which have 

 been written on Anatomy and Physiology — only 

 abstracts of them! How is a man to keep up his 

 acquaintance with all that is doing in the 

 physiological world — in a world advancing with 

 enormous strides every day and every hour — if 

 he has to be distracted with the cares of practice? 

 You know very well it must be impracticable to do 

 so. Our men of ability join our medical schools 

 with an eve to the future. Thev take the Chairs 

 of Anatomy or of Physiology; and by and by they 

 leave those Chairs for the more profitable pursuits 

 into which they have drifted by professional 

 success, and so they become clothed, and phys- 

 iology is bare. The result is, that in those 

 schools in which physiology is thus left to the 

 benevolence, so to speak, of those who have no 

 time to look to it, the effect of such teaching 

 comes out obviously, and is made manifest in 

 what I spoke of just now — the unreality, the 

 bookishness of the knowledge of the taught. 

 And if this is the case in physiology, still more 



