ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 139 



What is the object of medical education ? It is to enable 

 the practitioner, on the one hand, to prevent disease by his 

 knowledge of hygiene; on the other hand, to divine its 

 nature, and to alleviate or cure it, by his knowledge of 

 pathology, therapeutics, and practical medicine. That is 

 his business in life, and if he has not a thorough and practical 

 knowledge of the conditions of health, of the causes which 

 tend to the establishment of disease, of the meaning of 

 symptoms, and of the uses of medicines and operative ap- 

 pliances, he is incompetent, even if he were the best anato- 

 mist, or physiologist, or chemist, that ever took a gold medal 

 or won a prize certificate. This is one great truth respecting 

 medical education. Another is, that all practice in medi- 

 cine is based upon theory of some sort or other; and there- 

 fore, that it is desirable to have such theory in the closest 

 possible accordance with fact. The veriest empiric who 

 gives a drug in one case because he has seen it do good in 

 another of apparently the same sort, acts upon the theory 

 that similarity of superficial symptoms means similarity of 

 lesions; which, by the way, is perhaps as wild an hypothesis 

 as could be invented. To understand the nature of disease 

 we must understand health, and the understanding of the 

 healthy body means the having a knowledge of its structure 

 and of the way in which its manifold actions are performed, 

 which is what is technically termed human anatomy and 

 human physiology. The physiologist again must needs 

 possess an acquaintance with physics and chemistry, inas- 

 much as physiology is, to a great extent, applied physics 

 and chemistry. For ordinary purposes a limited amount 

 of such knowledge is all that is needful; but for the pursuit 

 of the higher branches of physiology no knowledge of these 

 branches of science can be too extensive, or too profound. 

 Again, what we call therapeutics, which has to do with 



