Some Characteristics of Anatomical Teaching in Great Britain. 



301 



Home, Alcock, Wilson, Guthrie and Handcock have left their names 

 associated with structures described by them in this region. 



The regions of the chief arteries also were, and are still special 

 subjects of description, upon which the British Anatomist expends 

 much care, accurately teaching their most minute relations in each 

 stage of their course. This is well shown in the British books on the 

 Arteries, such as those of Power, Harrison and Quain, which are 

 fuller and more minute from their own point of view, than any 

 works on the subject published elsewhere. 



This utilitarian aspect of Anatomical teaching has been largely 

 preserved to the present day. In the great London schools, Anatomy 

 has been, for the most part, taught solely as the handmaiden of Sur- 

 gery, and by men in surgical practice, who themselves were taught by 

 Surgeons. Few of these have had the time or opportunity, owing to 

 the engrossing cares of metropolitan practice, of obtaining a training 

 in Comparative Anatomy; and they have thus been prevented from 

 rising above the level of being simple expositors of the regions of the 

 body as the field for surgical work. Fewer still, except the teachers 

 of the most modern date, have had the advantage of early training in 

 Histology; which was too long practically disregarded, and too little 

 directly connected with Anatomy. These features are stamped on the 

 classical textbooks of British Anatomists, and will be noticed in the 

 earlier editions of Ellis, Gray, Wilson and Heath's Anatomies, and of 

 Holden's Osteology; all admirable manuals in their way; the best 

 possible exponents of the Anatomy required by the Surgeon, but weak 

 or deficient in other respects, not indeed professing to treat of their 

 subject in a scientific morphological manner. 



This want of morphological method in teaching Human Anatomy, 

 I has been maintained by the cooperation of other forces, with that al- 

 ready mentioned, viz. the teaching of Anatomy simply as a branch of 

 surgical preparation. In Britain the teaching in Medical schools is 

 \ regulated most largely by the characters of the qualifying examinations for 

 which the students are preparing; and until lately, these have been 

 confined to simple regional anatomy. 



Although the London College of Surgeons has maintained, and 



extended that splendid storehouse of morphological material, the 



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