6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



medical curriculum should be, for I find that views, more or less 

 closely approximating these, are held by all who have seriously con- 

 sidered the very grave and pressing question of medical reform ; and 

 have, indeed, been carried into practice, to some extent, by the most 

 enlightened examining boards. I have heard but two kinds of objec- 

 tions to them. There is, first, the objection of vested interests, which 

 I will not deal with here, because I want to make myself as pleasant 

 as I can, and no discussions are so unpleasant as those which turn on 

 such points. And there is, secondly, the much more respectable ob- 

 jection, which takes the general form of the reproach that, in thus 

 limiting the curriculum, we are seeking to narrow it. We are told 

 that the medical man ought to be a person of good education and gen- 

 eral information, if his profession is to hold its own among other 

 professions ; that he ought to know botany, or else, if he goes 

 abroad, he won't be able to tell poisonous fruits from edible ones ; 

 that he ought to know drugs, as a druggist knows them, or he won't 

 be able to tell sham bark and senna from the real articles ; that he 

 ought to know zoology, because — well, I really have never been able 

 to learn exactly why he is to be expected to know zoology. There 

 is, indeed, a popular superstition, that doctors know all about things 

 that are queer or nasty to the general mind, and may, therefore, be 

 reasonably expected to know the " barbarous binomials " applicable 

 to snakes, snails, and slugs; an amount of information with Avhich 

 the general mind is usually completely satisfied. And there is a 

 scientific superstition that physiology is largely aided by comparative 

 anatomy — a superstition which, like most, once had a grain of truth 

 at bottom ; but the grain has become homoeopathic, since physiology 

 took its modern experimental development, and became what it is now 

 — the application of the jirinciples of physics and chemistry to the 

 elucidation of the phenomena of life. 



I hold as strongly as any one can do, that the medical practitioner 

 ought to be a jDcrson of education and good general culture ; but I 

 also hold by the old theory of a faculty, that a man should have his 

 general culture before he devotes himself to the special studies of 

 that faculty ; and I venture to maintain that, if the general culture 

 obtained in the faculty of arts were what it ought to be, the student 

 would have quite as much knowledge of the fundamental principles 

 of physics, of chemistry, and of biology, as he needs, before he com- 

 menced his special medical studies. 



Moreover, I would urge that a thorough study of human physiol- 

 ogy is, in itself, an education broader and more comprehensive than 

 much that passes under that name. There is no side of the intellect 

 which it does not call into play, no region of human knowledge into 

 which either its roots, or its branches, do not extend ; like the Atlan- 

 tic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the shores 

 of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow 



