MEDICAL EDUCATION. 
157 
not be so where but a few, and generally it is very few, are can¬ 
didates for the prize. It was reasonable enough to expect that 
premiums would foster emulation and provoke competition, and 
that, by so operating, education would be improved and the student 
allured to habits of application; but we challenge the advocates of 
the plan to prove that it has had any such effect. On the contrary, 
we almost venture to say that it has had the reverse. That it has 
stimulated the competitors for prizes to a salutary exercise of their 
mental faculties we admit, but at the same time we verily believe 
that it has generated a certain amount of languor and apathy in 
those who do not enter into the competition. They feel that in 
comparison with these prizemen they are considered to hold some¬ 
what of an inferior position, and thereby do they lose so much of 
that most valuable feeling, self-respect. Nothing contributes more 
to a man’s degradation than a conviction that he is doomed to a 
station of inferiority or mediocrity. If this be the effect of this 
system, even in a slight degree, we incline to think that its benefits 
do not compensate for so serious an evil, seeing that in a class of 
one hundred, about ten, if so many, may be candidates for prizes, 
while ninety are satisfied to remain in obscurity. It has some¬ 
times appeared to us that lecturers, in dispensing these premiums, 
pay but a bad compliment to those of their class who fail to obtain 
them; and, to say the truth, we have sometimes been compelled to 
conceal our inclination to laugh at the mistake of a candidate for 
popularity in thus making one contented and nine discontented. 
Then there is another way in which the thing does mischief. It 
makes the students at large jealous of the prizeman, and sets them 
upon questioning his pretensions, by which the importance of the 
subject for the prize comes to be questioned ; hence the cui bono 
argument, which from this, as from other causes, has latterly done 
so much mischief, and promises to do more. If one man carries 
off the palm as the best of stethescopic adepts, nine men will hold 
the art cheaply, because they have been compelled to admit their 
inferiority as practisers of it; and the same of other subjects. But 
be the effect in this way good or bad, is it not injurious by raising 
suspicions as to the motives of those who offer these prizes 1 Is it 
not now universally admitted that the thing is done to “ draw 
pupils” in many cases, and that teachers who entertain our opinions 
on the subject have been compelled to resort to the practice in 
self-defence I Indeed, we begin to think that this is the state of the 
case from beginning to end; from the anniversary flare-up at 
University College, with Lord Brougham as the turncock of the 
fountain of honour, to the meanest “ cheap-and-nasty,” with its 
appropriate staff of touters and confederates. 
Dublin Medical Press. 
VOL. XXII. 
Y 
