50 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [iv. 



practitioner. The chances of life and death for all and each of us 

 may, at any moment, depend on the skill with which that practi 

 tioner is able to make out what is wrong in our bodily frames, 

 and on his ability to apply the proper remedy to the defect. 



The necessities of modern life are such, and the class from 

 which the medical profession is chiefly recruited is so situated, 

 that few medical men can hope to spend more than three or four, 

 or it may be five, years in the pursuit of those studies which are 

 immediately germane to physic. How is that all too brief period 

 spent at present ? I speak as an old examiner, having served 

 some eleven or twelve years in that capacity in the University of 

 London, and therefore having a practical acquaintance with the 

 subject ; but I might fortify myself by the authority of the 

 President of the College of Surgeons, Mr. Quain, whom I heard 

 the other day in an admirable address (the Hunterian Oration) 

 deal fully and wisely with this very topic. 1 



A young man commencing the study of medicine is at once 

 required to endeavour to make an acquaintance with a number 

 of sciences, such as Physics, as Chemistry, as Botany, as Physi 

 ology, which are absolutely and entirely strange to him, however 

 excellent his so called education at school may have been. Not 

 only is he devoid of all apprehension of scientific conceptions, not 

 only does he fail to attach any meaning to the words &quot; matter,&quot; 

 &quot; force,&quot; or &quot; law &quot; in their scientific senses, but, worse still, he has 

 no notion of what it is to come into contact with nature, or to lay 

 his mind alongside of a physical fact, and try to conquer it, in 

 the way our great naval hero told his captains to master their 

 enemies. His whole mind has been given to books, and 

 I am hardly exaggerating if I say that they are more real 

 to him than Nature. He imagines that all knowledge can 

 be got out of books, and rests upon the authority of some 



1 Mr. Quain s words (Medical Times and Gazette, February 20) are : &quot; A 

 few words as to our special Medical course of instruction and the influence 

 upon it of such changes in the elementary schools as I have mentioned. The 

 student now enters at once upon several sciences physics, chemistry, anatomy- 

 physiology, botany, pharmacy, therapeutics all these, the facts and the 

 language and the laws of each, to be mastered in eighteen months. Up to 



