308 ON MEDICAL EDUCATION XII 



tion. I will tell you what has struck me but in 

 speaking in this frank way, as one always does 

 about the defects of one's friends, I must beg you 

 to disabuse your minds of the notion that I am 

 alluding to any particular school, or to any par- 

 ticular college, or to any particular person ; and 

 to believe that if I am silent when I should be 

 glad to speak with high praise, it is because that 

 praise would come too close to this locality. What 

 has struck me, then, in this long experience of 

 the men best instructed in physiology from the 

 medical schools of London is (with the many and 

 brilliant exceptions to which I have referred), 

 taking it as a whole, and broadly, the singular 

 unreality of their knowledge of physiology. Now, 

 I use that word "unreality" advisedly : I do not say 

 "scanty ;" on the contrary, there is plenty of it 

 a great deal too much of it but it is the quality, 

 the nature of the knowledge, which I quarrel with. 

 I know I used to have I don't know whether I 

 have now, but I had once upon a time a bad repu- 

 tation among students for setting up a very high 

 standard of acquirement, and I dare say you may 

 think that the standard of this old examiner, who 

 happily is now very nearly an extinct examiner, 

 has been pitched too high. Nothing of the kind, 

 I assure you. The defects I have noticed, and 

 the faults I have to find, arise entirely from the 

 circumstance that my standard is pitched too low. 

 This is no paradox, gentlemen, but quite simply 



