HI.] ON MEDICAL EDUCATION. 65 



infinite diversity and variety of human knowledge, and 

 who shall gather all that together, and extract from it 

 that which is capable of being assimilated by the mind. 

 That function is a vast and an important one, and unless, 

 in such subjects as anatomy, a man is wholly free from 

 other cares, it 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 alto 

 gether and they consist merely of abstracts of the me 

 moirs 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 eye to the 

 future. They take the Chairs of Anatomy or of Phy 

 siology ; 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 

 physiology 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 must it be the 

 case in those branches of physics which are the founda 

 tion of physiology ; although it may be less the case 

 in chemistry, because for an able chemist a certain 



