348 RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 



If the gap which parts the physiological learning of that time from 

 the learning of to-day is great, still greater is the gap in the teaching. 

 Though at Charing Cross and in some other schools a coarse of physi- 

 ology was given, apart from that of anatomy, this was not separately 

 recognized by the College of Surgeons; it demanded simply a course 

 of anatomy and physiology, of which the lion's share fell undoubtedly 

 to anatomy. 



In accordance with this, in most schools, at all events the greater 

 part, and perhaps the sounder part of the physiology taught, was that 

 which may be deduced from anatomical premises. Where the teacher 

 went beyond this, he in most instances at least wandered into academ- 

 ical disquisitions and sterile discussions. Only in rare hands, such as 

 those of Wharton Jones and William Sharpey, was the subject so 

 treated as to be of any real use as a mental training for the medical 

 student preparing his mind to view rightly biological problems. The 

 science was not as yet sufficiently advanced to be an educational engine 

 which could be safely intuusted to the ordinary teacher's use. And the 

 method of teaching it, happily recognized now, which alone insures the 

 salutary influences of the knowledge acquired, that of following out in 

 the laboratory the very steps along which the science has trod, was 

 then wholly unknown. It was as a brilliant favorite pupil that young 

 Huxley was encouraged by Wharton Jones to use the microscope him- 

 self, and study, among other things, the structures of hairs; he was not 

 led to it, as one of a flock, in a practical course. 



Indeed, one kind of knowledge only was at that time demanded of 

 the medical student, in such quantity and in such a way as to render 

 the study of it a real mental training. Not in one year only of his 

 course, but in each year — in his first, his second, and his third year — 

 was the student, who hoped to obtain the diploma of the college, com- 

 pelled to attend lectures, each course consisting, not as in other subjects 

 of seventy, but of double that number of lectures, on what was styled 

 anatomy and physiology, but was in the main what we now call anat- 

 omy. Moreover, the student learned even then his anatomy in the same 

 way that he is bid to learn all other subjects now, not merely by listen- 

 ing to lectures, or even by witnessing formal demonstrations, but by 

 individual labor in.the laboratory — in that laboratory which we call a 

 dissecting room. Nowadays it may seem strange to insist that the 

 student should be studying anatomy during all the three years of his 

 curriculum, down to the very end of his studentship. Bat we must 

 admit the wisdom of it then. At that time human anatomy was the 

 one branch of knowledge which had achieved anything like complete 

 development, and which successive generations of able teachers had 

 shaped into an engine of mental training of the highest value. It was 

 then the mainstay of medical scientific teaching. It was in the dissect- 

 ing room that the student, of the time of which we are speaking, 

 acquired the mental attitude which prepared him for the bedside. He 



