Specialists as Teachers i8 



o 



There would always be found men, he declared, who 

 would make the choice between the wealth which may 

 come by successful practice and a modest competenc}-, 

 when that modest competency was to be combined 

 with a scientific career and the means of advancino- 

 knowledge. It was to those who made the latter 

 choice that he would entrust the teaching of the 

 sciences underlying medicine ; partly because from 

 the mere mechanical reason of time these men would 

 be better able to keep pace with the most recent ad- 

 vances in knowledge, and partly because their teaching 

 would be stimulated by their own work in advancing 

 knowledge. In this great matter the world is rapidly 

 advancing towards the standard of Huxley ; as each 

 new appointment is made it becomes more and more 

 probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and 

 investigator rather than a practitioner. 



In another general question of the politics of medical 

 education Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency 

 of change is toward his view. One of the first results 

 of the awakening of medical education in the middle of 

 this century was a tendency to throw an almost in- 

 tolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical 

 student. In the revolt from the old apprenticeship 

 system, in which the student, from the very first, gave 

 his chief attention to practice, and was left almost to 

 himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the princi- 

 ples and theories underlying his profession, the pendu- 

 lum swung too far the other way, and there was almost 

 no branch of the biological and physical sciences in 

 which he was not expected to go through a severe 

 training. On the old system the greater part of his 

 time was spent in the wards of the hospital ; on the 

 new system it was only at an advanced stage of his 



