690 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
the end destroy it altogether. The question of intellect and 
capacity everywhere obtrudes itself, and it must be answered, 
because the school in which this question is ignored, cannot 
fail to sink in the estimation of the professional public. Let 
any vacancy occur, wherever or whatever it may be, and there 
is no hospital so firmly fixed, that its managers can afford, in 
filling it up, to neglect the claims of superiority. We do not 
possess the concours , but we are thus acquiring a substitute 
for it, possibly more congenial to our national tastes and 
habits. It is worthy of observation, that medical education 
is the only education of a scientific character which exists on 
a large scale. Physical science scarcely enters into the 
system of education belonging to the other learned pro- 
fessions. In a study appealing, whatever its imperfections 
may be, at every step to experimental science, there can be 
no more powerful stimulus to the individual mind, whether 
of professor or pupil, than that arising from teaching. In 
the perpetual agitation of facts and opinions incidental to a 
teaching like that of medicine, discoveries and inventions are 
constantly maturing from numberless sources, and constitute 
those 
“ Truths of Science, waiting to be caught, 
That float about the threshold of an Age,” 
but which the fit minds are able to cast in individual moulds 
and appropriate as their own. The noblest achievements of 
medicine and medical men, are traceable to the influence of 
teaching, rather than to the meditations of the closet. The 
highest scintillations of genius of which we can boast have 
been struck out by the relations between teacher and pupil. 
It was as a medical student that Galileo began his splendid 
career of invention. Harvey heard his teacher, Fabricius. 
descant upon the valves of the heart, the purposes of which 
w T ere as yet hidden, and being himself appointed lecturer on 
anatomy at the College of Physicians, produced his great dis- 
covery of the circulation of the blood. Galvani, as an anato- 
mical teacher, discovered that form of electricity which bears 
his name, and which has become one of the most powerful 
agents of modern civilisation. Jenner, while a student, was 
already revolving in his mind the germs of his priceless dis- 
covery. Studying under his teacher, Corvisart, Laennec was 
accustomed, while yet a pupil, to listen to the sounds of the 
chest in disease, with the hope of obtaining aids to diagnosis, 
and this led him, at the early age of thirty-five, to the dis- 
covery of mediate auscultation, and the invention of the 
stethoscope. Sir Charles Bell describes the discoveries 
which have made his name illustrious to have arisen from 
