METHODS OF SCHOLASTIC TEACHING 331 



517. Hitherto the nature of their training has tended to 

 render medical men excessively conservative. Nevertheless 

 they have already assimilated and put to magnificent practical 

 use one of the two great scientific achievements of the age 

 Pasteur's discovery of the microbic origin of disease. The other 

 great achievement, Darwin's discovery of the adaptation of 

 species to the environment through Natural Selection, has 

 hardly been assimilated, and certainly put to no practical use 

 as yet. Both these discoveries should have been made by 

 medical men ; and would in all probability have been made by 

 them had their mental training been on more liberal lines. 1 

 They had long possessed the microscope and been acquainted 

 with the facts that some diseases were infective and some races 

 more resistant than others to certain forms of disease. But, 

 even if the authorities who control medical education be slow 

 to insist on the teaching of heredity, yet necessity must soon 

 force medical men to its study. Practical problems have 

 arisen which can be dealt with only by them, and which ever 

 more and more press for solution. Applied heredity will one 

 day be a branch of the Science of Public Health. 2 



opposition anywhere than in his own country, and bacteriology was a 

 laughing-stock to most men over middle age up to a comparatively 

 recent time." (British Medical Journal, Dec. 3, 1904.) With the educa- 

 tion medical men receive ossification of the intellect must necessarily 

 be a frequent occurrence. The reflective faculties alone enabled us to 

 utilize experience which appears to contradict opinion previously formed. 



1 As a fact one medical man, Dr. W. C. Wells, did outline the theory 

 of Natural Selection as long ago as 1813. He supposed that the natives 

 of Africa had become resistant to the diseases of the country through the 

 weeding out of the less-resistant individuals. (See Origin of Species, 

 pp. x., xi.) His speculations fell on stony ground. To this day most 

 medical men attribute racial adaptation to prevalent disease to the 

 transmission of acquired immunity. 



2 The late Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration 

 was the recipient of some interesting but conflicting medical statements, 

 which because so conflicting show as clearly as need be the necessity 

 of a training, not merely in heredity, but also in precise scientific habits 

 of thought. What should be a science was converted into a " tumbling 

 ground for whimsies/ 3 It had been alleged that the nation is deteriorat- 

 ing physically. Both the College of Physicians and the College of 

 Surgeons " laid stress upon the fact that the figures included in the 

 memorandum of the Director-General did not appear to them to support 

 the view that an increasing deterioration of physique is taking place in 

 the classes of the population from which military recruits are chiefly 

 drawn." Sir William Taylor, Director-General of the Army Medical 

 Service, expressed the opinion that "the idea of progressive physical 

 deterioration has occupied a much too prominent position in the minds 

 of those who had to consider and report on the advisability of the 

 inquiry." Apparently he did not believe in this progressive deteriora- 



