ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL. 
689 
only as one of the ripe fruits of civilisation that a medical 
school could exist. (Cheers.) But teaching nowhere begins 
or ends with itself. In a variety of w T ays it becomes a very 
important, I believe the most important, element in the 
progress of the profession. It has brought it to what it now 
is, and urges it onwards to that which it shall be hereafter. 
The system has many bearings, far beyond the communica- 
tion of knowledge from professor to pupil. To some of these 
I may be permitted briefly to refer. It has often been 
lamented that our profession is practised in privacy, and 
that in the sick chamber, the highest exercise of talent, or 
the greatest errors, are alike shrouded from public view. In 
this respect. Medicine has, to its manifest disadvantage, been 
contrasted with the Law, the administration of which is 
always before the public. In medicine, it is only in hospital 
practice, and in hospital teaching, that medicine becomes to 
a certain extent a public ministration. There everything is 
done under the eager eyes of students, and competence need 
not fear nor incompetency hope to miss applause and censure. 
The poor man has not in sickness, like the prince, his daily 
bulletin, but his progress is watched quite as narrowly, when 
once his case has been brought into the critical arena of 
teaching. Through the combined influence of teaching, and 
the medical press, the cases of the humblest persons may 
come under the review of the entire profession. I need not 
attempt to prove that this system is beneficial to the poor, 
who are the subject of it. We are far enough removed 
from such compendious practice as that of Dr. Last, whose 
direction was, “ Bleed the north ward, and blister the south 
w ard, to-day ; and blister the north, and bleed the south 
ward, to-morrow.” But there is no such correction of mere 
routine, as public practice. There is another mode in which 
teaching becomes a great purifier and vivifier of the profession. 
Hospital appointments and professional chairs are amongst 
the highest promotions which the profession offers, and it 
becomes of the first consequence that they should be given 
only to the most worthy. All the tendencies of medical 
teaching are in this salutary direction. Teaching brought 
light to the hospitals, and it was this which created the oppo- 
sition of the old hospital regime. The times when nepotism 
and favoritism w ere most rife, were those in which medical 
teaching was at its lowest ebb. When hospital practice w^as 
a private matter, hospital appointments could be bestowed 
without any great reference to qualification, but the publicity 
of our present system, a publicity daily becoming greater and 
greater, precludes this abuse to any great extent, and will in 
xxvi. 89 
