753 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
PLAIN TRUTH TO MEDICAL STUDENTS. 
The medical student of 1870 enters upon a career beset 
with difficulties but studded with rewards. The heir of 
centuries of research and devotion, he has to bear the weight 
of responsibilities ever increasing, and to uphold a standard 
which must be borne yet higher, and over steep and difficult 
paths. A higher national standard of education requires 
that he shall bring to his special studies the culture befitting 
a liberal profession ; and the increasing application of exact 
modes of diagnosis and research in treatment demands, at 
his hands, an acquaintance with branches of science collateral 
to medicine, formerly not generally required. On this sub- 
ject it is right to speak very plainly. Notwithstanding im- 
provements in the standard of preliminary educational re- 
quirements, our licensing bodies are perforce at this moment 
with a second-rate standard of mere schoolboy acquirements, 
which is by no means equal to the just demands of medical 
science, and which affords a very insufficient guarantee for 
the future of our profession in this country. The lament- 
able mediocrity of preliminary acquirements which they 
accept is the real hindrance to the progress of medicine as 
a science in this country. It is unnecessary to dissimulate 
the truth. The miserable inferiority in scientific research, 
the dearth of original work, the want of exactness, the 
poverty of physiological investigation, the ignorant impa- 
tience of “ unpractical detail” which we all have to deplore 
so much in the mass of professional work at this day are due 
to the inadequate preliminary cultivation of our students, to 
their defective training in scientific method, the small base 
on which the pyramid of medical lore is made to stand. The 
solemn deprecation of excessive devotion to microscopic re- 
search ; the empty sneer at chemical physic ; the idle and 
mischievous disregard of instruments of precision — the 
sphygmograph, the thermometer, the laryngoscope, the oph- 
thalmoscope — are all the expressions of a Philistine igno- 
rance. There is one enemy against wdiich the English student 
needs to be earnestly cautioned — it is what he calls his 
<f common sense.” It is almost as dangerous at the outset 
as that nondescript cloak of contented ignorance which often 
makes him in after life an enemy to science and a danger to 
mankind, and which he then calls his “ experience.” As a 
