PAPERS ON MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 257 



practical and applied side of medicine, so the student of 

 surgery learned conrage, self-control, and resourceful- 

 ness from the greatest men of his day. 



Today, the medical student learns his anatomy from 

 a bachelor or a master of science whose work has been 

 limited entirely to the dissecting-room and the labor- 

 atory. He learns his histology from another laboratory 

 man; his pathology from a teacher, most of whose time 

 has been spent in the morgue and in the preparation- 

 room; his physiological chemistry from a professional 

 chemist; his X-ray diagnosis and treatment from the 

 electrical specialist. The eye he studies under an oph- 

 thalmologist ; the ear under an aurist; the throat and 

 nose under a laryngologist and nervous diseases from a 

 neurologist. Nowhere at any stage of his long, expen- 

 sive and crowded course is there any opportunity for 

 him to come in contact with some broad mind which will 

 help him to digest this tremendous mass of information 

 pouring in on him from all sides and many sources. Xo- 

 where on the faculty is there a single man who is inter- 

 ested in the problems which will confront the doctor in 

 the first few years of his professional career. Above 

 all, nowhere in the curriculum is any attempt made to tell 

 him anything about the practical, everyday problems 

 which are going to confront him. He is taught all about 

 the human body, but he is taught nothing about human 

 beings. 



As a result, he leaves his alma mater, even after an 

 internship in a hospital, loaded down with the very latest 

 knowledge of all the innumerable branches of present- 

 day medicine and surgery, full of information given him 

 by experts who are twenty or thirty years ahead of him 

 in point of experience, equipped with all of the technical 

 knowledge of tests, examinations, analyses, methods of 

 diagnosis and methods of treatment, without having had 

 a single hint during the entire six years of his course as 

 to how he can secure patients on whom to exercise this 

 enormous accumulation of knowledge, how he shall keep 

 them after he has gotten them, or how he can collect 

 enough money from them to pay his professional ex- 

 penses and make a living for himself and his family. In 



