On medical education. 13 



I may inform the intelligent foreigner, is a dispensary for flogs. „Love 

 me, love my dog," is m proverb which must be truly indigenous in 



this country, where a sentimental regard for the brute creation is 

 reckoned a truer nobler instinct than the. love and care of one's fellow- 

 men. Our hospitals and schools of medicine may languish, and the 

 progress of science be hindered for lack of funds, but there will never 

 be a want of provision for our stray cats and dogs. 



Pathology is at present mainly represented by pathological ana- 

 tomy in the same way that, fifty years ago, the teaching of physiology 

 was little more than a name, and consisted chiefly of some sort of 

 anatomy. One would think that such a science as experimental patho- 

 logy was non-existent; that the cultivation and study of disease- pro- 

 ducing organisms was a form of amusement practised by a few plea- 

 sure-loving Germans ; that to know what a morbid product might look 

 like after death was the sole knowledge necessary to enable one to 

 combat its development and progress during life. I deeply regret that 

 University College is still behindhand in this matter; it is almost the 

 only instance I can remember in which she has not taken the lead in 

 the path of progress. But it is to the University of Cambridge that 

 the honour belongs of having instituted the first chair of Pathology 

 properly so-called, and of having made provision for the necessary 

 laboratories. I hope that we may not long linger behind, and that 

 the time is not far distant when we shall possess a laboratory worthy 

 of the name, which shall be devoted wholly to pathology, and presided 

 over by a trained experimental pathologist. Until this shall have been 

 accomplished here and elsewhere, it is hopeless to expect that the 

 teaching of pathology will be anything but a makeshift; and it is not 

 to be wondered at that our students find it necessary to go to Berlin, 

 or Leipzig, or Strassburg, in order to acquire that knowledge of patho- 

 logical methods and practice in their application which they in vain 

 seek to obtain in this country. All the arguments which I have urged 

 in favour of the learning of physiology by practical work, apply with 

 even greater force to pathology, for it is with pathological processes 

 that the medical man is concerned, and pathology is nothing but phy- 

 siology gone wrong. 



