1 82 Thomas Henry Huxley 



during Hiixle3''s life and there is still nothing compar- 

 able with the great universities of Europe and Amer- 

 ica, of Scotland and Ireland. Some dozen hospitals, 

 supported partly by endowments, partly by charities, 

 attempt each to maintain a complete, independent 

 medical school. As the requirements of medical edu- 

 cation in staff, laboratories, and general equipment has 

 advanced, these hospitals have made heroic efforts to 

 adv^ance with them. Notwithstanding the zeal and 

 public spirit of the staff and managers of the hospitals, 

 this want of system has naturally resulted in a multi- 

 plication of inefficient institutions and a number of 

 makeshift arrangements. Huxle^^ repeatedly urged the 

 concentration of all this diffuse effort into a few centres, 

 but this inevitable reform has not j^et become possible. 



A second important consideration, and one that has 

 a much wider application, relates to the kind of person 

 by whom the scientific sides of medical teaching should 

 be given. Primitively, all the instruction to medical 

 students was given by those actually engaged in the 

 practice of medicine. Huxley was strongly of the 

 opinion that the teachers of anatomj-, physiology, 

 chemistry, and so forth, should be specialists devoted 

 to these subjects for life, and not merely surgeons and 

 physicians who engaged in teaching until their practice 

 grew sufficiently to monopolise their attention. 



" I get every year," he said, " the elaborate reports of Henle 

 and Meissner — volumes of I suppose 400 pages altogther — 

 aud they consist merelj- of abstracts of the memoirs 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 aud every hour — 

 if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice ? " 



