ID I PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANATOMICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



encourages a widespread superficial knowledge of anatomy in general 

 rather than a thorough and accurate acquaintance with certain parts 

 which are of real importance to his candidates' future studies. Most 

 teachers are being constantly told by surgeons that the students who 

 go up into the wards know no anatomy ; it is meant that they are 

 ignorant of such things as the exact position of the inguinal rings, of 

 the facial nerve, of Stenson's duct, of the mastoid antrum, of the 

 epiphysial lines, and a great many other points which are frequently 

 turning up in surgery. The physicians, too, complain that they have 

 to teach the anatomy and position of the heart and brain over again, 

 and that when they are training their poxt-mortem clerks the latter do 

 not know when they are dealing with perfectly healthy viscera. In 

 vain one pleads in extenuation that, at the time of their anatomy 

 examination, the men knew the attachments of all the muscles by 

 heart and could recite the branches of all the arteries both forward 

 and backward. It seems to me that here are two points which we 

 examiners and teachers might agree to be much less exacting about, 

 and I fancy that I see indications which point to a move already 

 taking place in this direction. The amount of brain-power which has 

 been expended in learning by heart all these exact attachments is 

 quite incommensurate with the benefit obtained by the practitioner 

 from knowing them, even if he remembered them, which he seldom 

 does. It would be an immensely instructive thing if, say, ten of our 

 most successful physicians and surgeons could be put through an 

 ordinary present-day examination in anatomy to see what parts they 

 would do well in and what they had utterly forgotten without being 

 any the worse. I venture to think they would get very few marks on 

 their muscular attachments and arteries below the size of, say, the 

 lingual. 



The elimination of the smaller muscular attachments would re- 

 lieve osteology of one of its greatest terrors, but even then we lay too 

 much stress on the smaller details of the bones. To me it is a matter 

 of much greater interest to see how a candidate recognises the general 

 shape, sex and age of a skull than how glibly he can recite the exact 



