METHODS OF SCHOLASTIC TEACHING 329 



of an improvement in medical education, since it demon- 

 strates that some medical men at least, though workers 

 in a scientific subject, are out of touch with scientific 

 truth. 



515. The present position of the medical profession is 

 deeply unsatisfactory. Its intellectual status is not what it 

 should be. As the largest body of scientific workers it ought 

 to exercise a preponderating intellectual influence. It 

 exercises hardly any. Certainly the whole body of medical 

 men have not wielded an influence at all comparable to that 

 by means of which, during the last half-century, a few 

 workers in heredity and its corollary evolution, have " shaken 

 the thought of the civilized world," and forever altered our 

 conception of nature. Owing to lack of breadth in medical 

 education, to the enormous strain placed on the memory, 

 and to the comparative neglect of the reflective faculties, 

 the intellectual outlook of the average medical man is not 

 noticeably wider than that of the average solicitor or 

 merchant. He is just as much steeped in mere common- 

 place popular prejudices, just as non-receptive to fresh 

 evidence. Indeed it is not unusual to hear members of 

 other professions express the opinion that doctors tend, as a 

 rule, to narrowness and conventionality. 



516. It is not enough that the medical man is an ordinary 

 citizen, a little less influential than the parson, a little more 

 enlightened than the town councillor. By right of superior 

 knowledge and intellectual training he should be much more. 

 Owing to the nature of his studies a tolerable knowledge of 

 heredity and all that it implies would be particularly easy of 

 acquirement by him. He would have to learn almost no fresh 

 facts, but would as a student undergo a course of close reason- 

 ing and thinking which would occupy comparatively little time, 

 but which would remedy the principal defect in his education. 

 It is not a valid excuse to declare that there is not available 

 time for instruction in heredity in the already overloaded 

 medical curriculum. Much in that curriculum is redundant or 

 at any rate useless, since in the lack of a knowledge of heredity 

 it fails to link up with subsequent experience. Again, it is 

 no valid excuse to declare that not enough is certainly known 

 concerning heredity to justify its inclusion in medical studies. 

 That contention, though often urged, indicates nothing more 

 than ignorance as to the true state of our knowledge. Even 

 were it valid the materials for study in the hands of medical 

 men are so magnificent that it could soon be made invalid. 

 In any case, it is neither expedient nor right that medical 



