104 
EVIDENCE ON MEDICAL LEGISLATION. 
opinion that the medical profession should be as far as possible 
removed from any thing that should give it the character of a trade. 
I doubt whether it would be possible to carry it so far as to make 
it a regulation that general practitioners should not sell drugs ; it 
may be left to their good feeling, and to the improvement which 
may be hoped for by raising the standard of education : but in the 
country it would be quite impossible for them not to keep their own 
drugs ; and I take it that their patients derive advantage from it, 
by getting better drugs than they would get from the small 
chemists and druggists’ shops. I am apprehensive that the tend- 
ency of elevating the education of general practitioners may be 
to introduce a lower class of practitioners in the chemists and drug- 
gists. It does not occur to me to make any suggestion to remedy 
that: I think that the Legislature must always require a certain 
amount of information, such an amount as will qualify persons to 
practise with safety to the public; and if you find that chemists 
and druggists are rising into practitioners, you must require of them 
the same : therefore it is, though I cannot very well say how it is 
to be done, that I stated to Sir James Graham it was desirable that 
there should be something like illegality or penalty affixed to 
unqualified practice. I trust a good deal to the high standard of 
professional and gentlemanly feeling for correcting some of the evils 
which the law cannot prevent. I would endeavour by a system, 
whatever it was, to produce the highest qualification that you could 
produce; and to give hope to all, even in the lowest grade, that 
they might rise to the highest if they would give the time and 
study requisite for its attainment. I attach the greatest importance 
to keeping up a high tone of gentlemanly feeling in our profession. 
On that ground I think it important to encourage the high grades 
in our profession going to the universities, as tending to connect 
the heads of our profession with the highest persons in the land ; 
but I would add to that, that I think it essential to the interests of 
even the lower ranks of professional men ; for I think that the 
one-faculty plan would soon be found to have a very serious effect 
upon the pocket of the general practitioner. It is the fact that that 
gentlemanlike feeling is now to a great extent spreading through 
the profession, and tending to elevate persons who before were in 
the lower scale of society. 
Fees for Education . — The serious effect upon the pocket of the 
general practitioner to which I referred is, if the standard of pay- 
ment were not regulated by high fees, you would have a reduction 
of fees : you would have a run for cheap practice, as you have in 
other trades. I would not, then, regulate the fees of the medical 
practitioner by law ; the fees of the physician are not regulated by 
law, and I am very sorry that the fees of surgeons are regulated by 
