Locke and Sydenham / [Anon].

  • John Brown
Date:
[1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Locke and Sydenham / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Demoralizing System of CrammingT 21) prodigious treasures of mere science, available for practice—how the art may keep pace with, and take the maximum of good out of the science. We have often thought that the apprenticeship system is going too much into disrepute. It had its manifest and great evils; hut there was much good got by it that is not to be got in any other way. The personal authority, the imita¬ tion of their master—the watching his doings, and picking up his practical odds and ends—the coming under the influence of his mind, following in his steps, looking with his eyes, accumu¬ lating a stock of knowledge, multifarious it might be, the good of which was not fully known till after-years explained and con¬ firmed its worth. There were other practical things besides jokes learned and executed in the apprentices’ room, and there were the friendships for life, on which so much, not merely of the comfort, but the progress of a physician depends. Now everything, at least most, is done in public, in classes; and it is necessarily with the names of things rather than the things them¬ selves, or their management, that the young men have chiefly to do. The memory* is exercised more than the senses or the judg¬ ment; and when the examination comes, as a matter of course the student returns back to his teacher as much as possible of what he has received from him, and as much as possible in his very words. He goes over innumerable names. There is little oppor¬ tunity even in anatomy for testing his power or his skill as a workman, as an independent observer and judge, under what Sir James Clark justly calls the demoralizing system of crammingT He repeats what is already known ; he is not able to say how all or any of this knowledge may be turned to practical account. Epictetus cleverly illustrates this very system and its fruits— As if sheep, after they have been feeding, should present their * Professor Syme, in his Letter to Sir James Graham on the Medical Bill, in which, in twelve pages, he puts the whole of this vexed question on its true footing, makes these weighty observations :—“ As a teacher of nearly twenty-five years’ standing, and well acquainted with the dispositions, habits, and powers of medical students, I beg to remark, that the system of repeated examinations on the same subject by different Boards, especially if protracted beyond the age of twenty-two, is greatly opposed to the acquisition of sound and useful knowledge. Medicine, throughout all its departments, is a science of observation ; memory alone, how¬ ever retentive, or diligently assisted by teaching, is unable to afford the qualifica¬ tions for practice, and it is only by digesting the facts learned, through reflection, comparison, and personal research, that they can be appropriated with improving effect ; hut when the mind is loaded with the minutise of elementai’y medical and collateral study, it is incapable of the intense and devoted attention essential to attaining any approach to excellence in practical medicine and surgery. It has accordingly always appeared to me, that the character of medical men depends less upon what passes during the period even of studentship than upon the mode in which they spend the next years, when their trials and examinations being over, the whole strength of a young and disciplined intellect may be preparing itself for the busi¬ ness of life.”
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