1234 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Another answer is Education. For some of its present notable 

 advances, e.g. Dr. Montessori's pioneering and that of Dr. Adler 

 and others, are examples of the fruitful intercrossings of medical 

 and educational psychology. One way to this — one to which, after 

 lifelong teachings and ponderings, we only feel adequately awakening 

 as we write, and as we are dropping our oars to look around and 

 forward — is that, despite all the many needs of improving medical 

 education and remedying its defects, as from over-pressure to under- 

 experience, most of these may best be met by developing its quali- 

 ties, in many ways so far ahead of the instruction and preparation 

 given in the other old faculties and departments, of letters, law, or 

 divinity. Thus, though the medical student has usually done with 

 letters when he begins his course, more than in most other profes- 

 sions, he keeps touch with the advances recorded in other languages. 

 He gets into touch also with law, through medical j urisprudence, and 

 with history through that of medicine; while from the first begin- 

 nings of practice, he is learning much of the human kindness of 

 the good parson, and even of the confessional of the wise priest; 

 and as seeking to turn his patient to better habits, he becomes 

 something of educationalist as well. Even his first year's preliminary 

 studies are more significant for education than in his natural 

 impatience to get to work he commonly realises; for his outlines of 

 physical and chemical science on one hand, and of biological science 

 on the other, are what all other schools, and University faculties 

 also, require far more than they yet realise, amid their present seas 

 of words. For — first of all in the laboratories of each and all these 

 preliminary studies, as in those oi later ones — the medical student 

 is taken out of the feebly verbalistic instruction of the three R's, 

 with their "parrot's training", their memory examinations. He is 

 getting a start of real and occupational education, through eyes and 

 hands to head, and with practical examinations as tests of working 

 competence accordingly. Is not all education in need of the like? 

 He is thus so far practically prepared for that fuller awaking of 

 youth which so often comes to him with his first bit of real medical 

 or surgical responsibility, as from the sudden accident of cut or 

 burn, of bruise or fracture, of syncope or seeming poisoning. After 

 that arousal, he often feels his work has really begun, and sees more 

 fully the need of further studies for it, and along with it. Further- 

 more, these first year science studies are anticipating for the student 

 the needed and incipient progress of our social world. For while 

 we need to understand all we can of the phj/sical fundamentals, by 

 which our industrial age has been brought about, with its qualities 

 and its defects, the needed advances beyond its limitations are not 

 those for which the other faculties prepare, as with more politics 

 and bureaucracy, more preaching or more print ; but quite definitely, 

 that advance towards the understanding of life for which biological 



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