142 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



value, has no more relevancy, than the knowledge of how 

 the steel of his scalpel is made. 



All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say that any 

 fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote 

 from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned 

 to account. But in medical education, above all things, it 

 is to be recollected that, in order to know a little well, one 

 must be content to be ignorant of a great deal. 



Let it not be supposed that I am proposing to narrow 

 medical education, or, as the cry is, to lower the standard 

 of the profession. Depend upon it there is only one way of 

 really ennobling any calling, and that is to make those who 

 pursue it real masters of their craft, men who can truly do 

 that which they profess to be able to do, and which they are 

 credited with being able to do by the public. And there is 

 no position so ignoble as that of the so-called "liberally- 

 educated practitioner," who may be able to read Galen in 

 the original; who knows all the plants, from the cedar of 

 Lebanon to the hyssop upon the wall; but who finds himself, 

 with the issues of life and death in his hands, ignorant, 

 blundering, and bewildered, because of his ignorance of the 

 essential and fundamental truths upon which practice must 

 be based. Moreover, I venture to say, that any man who 

 has seriously studied all the essential branches of medical 

 knowledge; who has the needful acquaintance with the 

 elements of physical science; who has been brought by 

 medical jurisprudence into contact with law; whose study 

 of insanity has taken him into the fields of psychology; has 

 ipso facto received a liberal education. 



Having lightened the medical curriculum by culling out 

 of it everything which is unessential, we may next con- 

 sider whether something may not be done to aid the medical 

 student toward the acquirement of real knowledge by 



