July 26, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



o 



133 



To meet the necessities of this class of 

 practitioners alone the establishment in the 

 medical schools of courses in normal med- 

 ical psychology is urgently demanded. To 

 graduate a psychiatrist without this knowl- 

 edge is like pretending to qualify a general 

 practitioner without teaching him physiol- 

 ogy. Exceedingly few of the graduates, 

 eager to get at actual cases, and the best of 

 them soon enough crowded for time, will or 

 can take up the long-drawn unadapted psy- 

 chological courses in the universities and 

 colleges, nor, did they desire to do so, would 

 funds be often at their disposal, the debts of 

 the young doctor being often, as it is, quite 

 sufficiently appalling to the young man 

 anxious then to earn as fast as possible. 

 For the sake of these men alone, then, 

 courses in medical psj'chology should be 

 provided where alone they will be studied 

 with the splendidly productive medical- 

 student eagerness and attention. 



The education given, or rather sold, to 

 the medical student seems in general, how- 

 ever, too grossly materialistic, too somatic. 

 He learns but one side of this two-sided 

 story ; from the first year to the fourth, 

 from the dissecting room to the gynecolog- 

 ical or otological clinic, the routine student 

 sees and hears of muscles and bones, and vis- 

 eera, sense-organs, nerves and vital fluids, 

 but little, unaccountably little, of that other 

 aspect of men and women which to these 

 very men and women is their life, while these 

 other, these organs, are but needful instru- 

 ments of that life's attainment. And their 

 point of view, it need not be said, is also that 

 of philosophy ; shift it, and illogical confu- 

 sion follows. The layman cares little or 

 nothing for his stomach's condition so long 

 as it gives him no pain and takes good care 

 of what his will and his appetite lead him 

 to supply to it. The woman in search of a 

 happy family life thinks seldom of her re- 

 productive mechanism so long as it gives 

 her healthy children whom she can love. 



There is something besides cell-built tissue 

 for the gynecologist in charge of an opera- 

 tive case to consider when of two women, 

 alike in vigor, who undergo identical ovar- 

 iotomies, for example, one goes in three 

 weeks from the hospital a new woman, 

 cheerful, capable and happy, while the 

 other becomes an hysteric wreck never per- 

 haps to equal her former self in happiness 

 or in health. As every surgeon knows, 

 such differences are met continually and 

 they puzzle him. Why is it that present 

 medical education takes no account of the 

 principles underlying phenomena like this? 

 So far as the student is concerned, the 

 course, four years or three years long, 

 quite ignores in general the emotional and 

 temperamental factors which in one way 

 or another, directly or indirectly, less 

 or more, enter into almost every chronic 

 case and into many of the acute cases which 

 the general practitioner is called upon to 

 treat. Instead of striving to teach the stu- 

 dent what conditions underlie mental hab- 

 its and idiosyncrasies, medical instructors 

 are now content practically to ignore them, 

 regardless of possible great benefits to come 

 from their study as psychological data. 

 Too often is the medical man the most ma- 

 terialistic-minded member of a community, 

 when his view should be much deeper, into 

 the controlling forces of life. This is the nat- 

 ural outcome when in a long medical course 

 no part of the individual is presented to 

 the student except what he can feel with 

 his hands or see through the microscope. 

 Yet how commonplace is the assertion that 

 the man, the real man or woman, is not his 

 or her body, but the will, affections, habits, 

 character, of the individual, while (what is 

 more immediate to our argument) these 

 same aspects of consciousness are often the 

 direct molders or destroyers of disease 

 and, as one side of an inseparable psycho- 

 physical organism, have more control or in- 

 fluence over the functions purely somatic 



