59 
MISCELLANEA. 
Qualifications of Lecturers. 
Poeta nascitur non fit , and so is a lecturer on medical subjects. 
Not only need he not learn anything touching the subject he pro- 
poses to handle, but he may be very little acquainted with sub- 
jects generally. He must be inspired. To practise surgery re- 
quires time, labour, and perseverance ; to teach surgery or any of 
the branches of knowledge on which it rests requires nothing of 
the kind. The College of Surgeons say we will not allow any one 
to teach surgeons unless he be educated as well, at least, as a Fel- 
low of our College. We will not recognise him unless he can 
claim an examination, if he has not been examined already. This 
seems reasonable, but it is found inconvenient. It bears hard 
on some worthy and gifted individual, and is therefore a grievance. 
I have not, says the candidate for lectureship honours, been en- 
gaged six years in study ; I do not want to become a fellow. Per- 
haps not, nor a licentiate either, but he wants to be the teacher of 
fellows and licentiates, and to pocket their money too. This is 
queer. Some of our readers will open wide their eyes, and ask 
in wonder, is this the only test of lecturing fitness ] Even so. 
The lecturer of surgeons need not be a surgeon or a physician 
either. He must have a diploma, et preterea nihil . True it is, 
the Colleges attempt to combat this doctrine, but in vain. The 
candidate is too strong, or the case is pressing. A lecturer is wauted 
to complete the school, or an excellent friend’s son or nephew is in 
a fix. Any man who “ passes,” ipso facto is a lecturer on anatomy ; 
a lecturer on surgery should, it is said, be an hospital surgeon ; but 
then it may be said, and with truth, that the candidate for recogni- 
tion is as good as an hospital surgeon. Then the candidate is “ a 
chemist,” although no surgeon or physician either; but Davy was, 
and Faraday is, neither physician nor surgeon. True, our friend 
here is no Davy or Faraday, but he is perhaps something more 
apropos, perhaps an apothecary, and an apothecary is good to 
“draw” the apothecaries’ boys, and good too to “call one in.” 
The resources, in fact, of expediency are inexhaustible, and salves 
for thin-skinned consciences always ready. Other branches of 
surgical education are equally easy of adjustment. A lecturer on 
the practice of physic need not — nay, the doctors say, should not — 
have had a surgical education ; yet a man may not be the worse 
lecturer on peritonitis for knowing something of strangulated 
hernia, or on croup, for knowing something of the value of tracheo- 
