* £823.] 
For ihe Monthly Magazine. 
LETTERS ON THE 
MEDICAL SCHOOL OF LONDON. 
LETTER II. 
To Frederick William Maitland, esq. 
Trinity College, Oxford. 
AM very, very glad, my dear 
friend, that my last letter afforded 
you so much amusement and edifica- 
tion. Your eagerness for a continua- 
tion ot my correspondence,—which is 
too fervently expressed to be merely 
assumed,—convinces me that you do, 
indeed, experience pleasure from the 
lucubrations of your humble servant; 
and I need not observe, that this is at 
once a reward and an excitement 
to me. 
I concluded my last letter by pro-- 
mising an account of the Medical 
School of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital ; 
and I proceed to fulfil this promise,— 
premising, however, that the brief 
notice which a letter can convey must 
be necessarily imperfect and incom- 
plete ; however, such as it is, I send it 
to you. 
St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. was 
founded by that convivial and mirth- 
loving monarch, Henry the Eighth, 
whose rotund and portly efligy graces 
the western entrance of the building, 
which forms a handsome quadrangle, 
with the theatre, dissecting rooms, and 
other offices behind the principal 
structure. It is capable of containing 
between 4 and 500 patients, and the 
business of each department is con- 
ducted in the most regular and bene- 
ficial manner. Nothing can exceed 
the cleanliness of the wards, the atten- 
tion of the nurses, and the whole 
management of the establishment: in 
short, every thing that can be done to 
contribute to the comfort of the pa- 
tientsis done. But it is of the medical 
and surgical department that 1 would 
_ chiefly speak ; and this subject I shall 
‘preface by a few general observations 
on the exclusive benefit arising to a 
practitioner from belonging to any of 
our public hospitals. So far as I can 
understand, there is no actual salary 
given either to asurgeon or physician ; 
tt they possess advantages which 
‘more than compensate for this defi- 
ciency. In the first place, it gives 
t a consequence in the estimation of 
the world, thereby increasing their 
notoriety, and, of course, their prac- 
tice; in the second, it affords them 
facilities for acquiring professional 
___ Moxtuy Mas, No. 385, 
Letters on the Medical School of London. 9 
knowledge, of which their. fellow- 
Tabourers are deprived; and thirdly, 
it is a source of very considerable 
profit in a pecuniary point of view, as 
it enables them to take pupils, by 
whom they are handsomely fee’d. 
Besides, most of our public practi- 
tioners are lecturers; and this, again, 
is a most decided advantage to a pro- 
fessional person; for, independent of 
the actual pecuniary profit, he derives 
an extensive practice by ensuring the 
assistance of his pupils, who, when 
established in practice, resort to their 
preceptor in cases of difficulty, and 
thus “call him in” to his own manifest 
advantage. Again, the public natu- 
rally imagine, that a person who 
professes to teach others must have 
acquired a more than ordinary share 
of knowledge and experience himself, 
to enable him to do so: a fact, how- 
ever, by no means universal; but let 
this pass. John Bull thinks'so; and 
that is enough. 
There is another subject upon which 
I would say a word or two before I 
proceeded to the more immediate 
business of my letter ; and this is, the 
suspicions which exist among the 
vulgar of the practice of wantonly 
trying experiments upon hospital 
patients. Of this I have never yet 
seen a single instance. On the con- 
trary, in such hospitals as I have 
visited I have witnessed with much 
pleasure the care, attention, and kind- 
ness, which the surgeons exercise 
towards their poor patients. That this 
practice might once have been preva- 
lent, I will not deny; nor will I now 
enter upon any vindication of it. I 
shall only observe, that, although it has 
now quite passed away, the prejudice 
still remains; and it-was but the other 
day, that a most miserable object, a 
complete mass of disease and wretch- 
edness, positively told me, that he 
would rather die in the streets than go 
to the hospital, to be killed by the 
doctors. But now to business. 
The lecturers belonging to St. Bar- 
tholomew’s Hospital are—Mr. ABER- 
NETHY, on Anatomy, Physiology, and 
Surgery ; Dr. Hue, on Chemistry and 
Materia Medica; and Doctors Goocu 
and Conquest, on Midwifery. Of 
the three last named it is not neces- 
sary to say much: they are good 
lecturers, and attentive to their stu- 
dents ; so that they have good classes, 
and answer their own ends, as well as 
Cc ~~ those 
