July 25, 1901] 



NA TUBE 



299 



faculty in living reality, and not merely one which exists 

 as a coherent body only in a printed list. 



If one may judge by the extent of Prof. Porter's text- 

 book, the Harvard student is taught a wider course of 

 practical physiology than is attempted to be taught at 

 any of our London medical schools, and, further, if he be 

 taught the subject in the carefully inductive manner out- 

 lined by the author in his preface, he also obtains much 

 more true scientific training in addition to this more 

 extensive course. The latter point is the more important 

 of the two, for, as Prof. Porter truly puts it in his preface, 

 "the student should be trained rather than informed," 

 for "the trained observer can, and must, be trusted to 

 inform himself." 



This wider course is covered in a period of four 

 months, while in this country the student of medicine 

 spends two years over physiology. Things do go pro- 

 verbially quick in America, but this is not the reason for 

 the disparity in time ; the explanation is that the Harvard 

 man spends all his hours of study during those four 

 months upon physiology, whereas in this country the 

 medical student's time is spent in attempting to make 

 an intimate mixture of physiology, anatomy, organic 

 chemistry and therapeutics. At the end of the two years 

 the result is that the British student has wasted 

 much time in hopping about from one branch of the tree 

 of knowledge to another, and has not spent a sufficient 

 interval at any one sitting upon any particular branch to 

 gain much real benefit from it. So that finally he neither 

 knows much of the experimental facts of any one of the 

 subjects, nor, which is of more importance still, has he 

 gained any training in scientific method or been imbued 

 with any of the modern spirit of scientific inquiry or 

 research. 



His weary brain has been enslaved at unpalatable task- 

 work all the two years, grinding up, at the same time, all 

 four of these important subjects so that he may make 

 answer to stock questions upon them at examination 

 time. He is not judged at all by his character as a 

 student known to his teachers, for the good or bad work 

 that he has turned out during that period, or for any 

 talent or originality that he has shown. There is no 

 attempt, nor is there time for any attempt, to allow him 

 to show what subject he loves ; indeed, the system is 

 calculated to make him hate them all instead. He must 

 simply grind and be ground to the same stereotyped 

 pattern as all his fellows ; he must, in short, read and 

 struggle to pass his Inter. M.B. Ask any of these men 

 what he is doing at any part of the period and you will 

 hear, not that he is studying anatomy or physiology or 

 any of the other subjects, but that he is going up for his 

 " Inter." at such and such a date ; the dominant idea is 

 the woeful e.xamination and how best to get through it, 

 and not any attraction for, or interest in, his subjects of 

 study. 



For the continuance of this condition of things the 

 teachers, and not the students, are responsible. When we 

 introduce a rational system of studying these subjects, 

 which will teach our students to think, to examine criti- 

 cally the work done by others who have gone before 

 them and to make attempts to proceed farther by them- 

 selves, a new era will dawn in which students will take an 

 interest in their work and will rejoice in knowing that 

 NO. 1656, VOL. 64] 



they will be judged on what they have been doing through- 

 out their course, and not upon the extent to which they 

 have impaired their memories and intellects by merely 

 memorising the opinions of other men from their text- 

 books and lectures. 



Contrasted with the scientific progress of our time, the 

 maintenance of our present system of examinations, and 

 the perversion of the work of our costly laboratories into 

 mere preparation for them, instead of teaching these 

 subjects as a training in scientific observation and re- 

 search, may truly be described as conservatism run to 

 seed. 



If it be granted that our main object ought to be, 

 during these earlier years, to give the student a training 

 in the methods of scientific investigation in the broad 

 field of biology, and not to cram his mind with experi- 

 mental facts gathered from the text-book or lecture-room, 

 then the system introduced at Harvard of studying one 

 subject thoroughly at a time and, when this has been 

 mastered, from the point of view expressed above, pass- 

 ing on to the next, is undoubtedly a move in the proper 

 direction. This is more especially true in the case of the 

 branches of biological study where a knowledge of one 

 subject is required before another can be advantageously 

 taken up ; where there is, so to speak, a definite tiatiiral 

 order in which the subjects should be taken up. The 

 writer's one experience under our present system, to give 

 an e-xample, is that the first two months or more of 

 attendance on lectures in physiology are absolutely 

 wasted, because the student begins his study of anatomy 

 at the same time as physiology ; if he completely finished 

 his anatomy before he came to physiology, and then had 

 all his time for physiology, our task would be much 

 lighter, nor would the student be handicapped at all in 

 his study of anatomy by not having learnt his physiology.. 

 Again, he ought to have completed a course on cellular 

 physiology and done all his minute anatomy or histology, 

 including his practical work in histology, before he com- 

 mences to study the physiology of the mammal. 



Further, what advantage accrues from studying a 

 number of subjects at the same time ? The student can- 

 not possibly become absorbed in one and grow to enjoy 

 really the study of it, because he feels that his other sub- 

 jects are becoming cold from neglect. He must, there- 

 fore, turn about from one to another, and surely no 

 scientific progress can be made by reading in such a 

 scrappy fashion. The person who can do it with con- 

 spicuous success is certainly not the kind of person we 

 want to encourage ; yet for such intellectual weeds we 

 arrange a system which chokes out, or does the best that 

 can be imagined to choke out, our choicest flowers. This 

 furnishes a sufficient clue to the well-known observation 

 that our men of highest genius in the past have often 

 been those that the schools rejected, or found no occasion 

 to honour. 



The conscientious student who starts simultaneously the 

 study of anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry and 

 materia medica under our present system is surely to be 

 pitied. He hears a lecture in anatomy and tries to take 

 some interest in this ; he passes on to one, say, in organic 

 chemistry, and for the time switches his attention oft" 

 anatomy on to organic chemistry ; next he turns his mind 

 to physiology, and finally, weary and baffled, he probably 



