616 
PROFESSOR WILSON’S 
aminers of the Apothecaries’ Company, receives most deservedly 
much of the odium of the deficiency of the medical student in 
classical information. The examiners still continue to enforce 
the letter of their law to the oblivion of its spirit. They insist 
upon the possession of the parchment, without taking any steps 
to secure to the apprentice the instruction which that parchment 
was intended to ensure. This is the more to be regretted, since 
the Board of Examiners of the Society of Apothecaries are com- 
posed of men of enlightened judgment, who have contributed 
more than any other of our corporate bodies to the improvement 
of medical education. The five years of apprenticeship of the 
medical student are in too many instances not merely wasted, for 
their effect is worse even than that; — they are, too frequently, a 
period during which mental idleness is confirmed, and bad and 
dangerous habits are acquired. 
The studies which are necessary to the acquirement of a know- 
ledge of the medical profession, the purely medical studies as 
they may be styled, in order to distinguish them from the classi- 
cal and scientific pursuits which constitute the education of every 
gentleman, the purely medical studies, are all comprehended 
under the general term, medicine. If we proceed to the analy- 
sis of medicine, we find it to be constituted primarily of medicine 
and surgery; the former, according to the old signification of the 
term, being confined to the consideration of inward complaints, 
and the latter being limited to outward diseases, and principally 
to injuries. The origin of these appellations it may be conveni- 
ent briefly to develop, in order to comprehend the nature of a 
distinction which has been handed down to the present day, in 
virtue of a feud which the two terms seem to have engendered 
between brethren exercising the same profession, both disciples 
in the same good and sublime cause. 
In the days of our forefathers, medicine, as at the present time, 
was the science of treating disease, and its practitioners were 
called physicians. The physicians, as I have before observed, 
were men of great learning ; they were for the most part priests, 
that is to say, they devoted their lives to the service of God, and 
to the diffusion of the blessings derivable from that first source 
among the people. To qualify for this sacred office it was neces- 
sary to be versed in the learning preserved in the records of the 
temples; and they added to their sacred offices the study of 
nature, and the storing together in the records entrusted to their 
care the experience which they gathered from their studies and 
from the treatment of the sick. Such is the primitive physician ; 
and the standard of the present day, it must be acknowledged, 
has not far. departed from the glorious original. 
