10 E. A. Schäfer, 



fitably employed in acquiring some notion regarding the appearance, 

 characters, and composition of drugs. Not that this knowledge ought 

 necessarily to form part of the stock-in-trade of every medical man, 

 but because, in very many cases, it is still needful for the doctor to 

 deal in drugs, especially in localities which are not populous or civi- 

 lised enough to support a regular druggist. The time of a professional 

 man is, or should be, more valuable than to be spent in bottling up 

 medicines or preparing pills and powders, and it were much to be 

 desired that the practitioner should be relieved of this incubus, and 

 set free for the performance of work requiring greater skill and higher 

 knowledge. Until, however, this change is everywhere possible, it may 

 be necessary to require the student to obtain some knowledge, and 

 that of a precise kind, of the general properties and appearance and 

 methods of compounding drugs, so as to be able readily to distinguish 

 them, and to detect adulteration. But to expand the teaching of 

 materia medica to the extent to which it is developed by many lec- 

 turers and text -books — I can speak freely, because this has long 

 since ceased to be the case in this College — to expect the student 

 to remember the characters of all natural orders that contain any me- 

 dicinal plants, to enter into the most minute details regarding the 

 methods adopted in the manufacture of medicinal remedies, to rake 

 together as much information of a miscellaneous kind as can be com- 

 pressed within the limits of a course of lectures or between the covers 

 of a text-book, and label the contents of the heap materia medica — 

 against such practices as these we cannot raise too loud or vigorous 

 a protest. Truly, Goldsmith might as a medical student have been 

 contemplating the bald and venerable pate of a worthy predecessor of 

 our professor of materia medica, when he composed the expressive lines 

 which tell how 



„Still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, 

 That one small head could carry all he knew!" 



What wonder that a cry has been raised for reforming materia 

 medica altogether away from the medical curriculum ! I remember, 

 many years ago, to have heard in this very theatre no less an autho- 

 rity than Professor Huxley advocating its abolition. 1 am not quite 

 Jure whether this bag-apd-baggage policy might not eventually prove 



