Address on medical education : delivered at University College, Dundee, June 27th, 1885 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address on medical education : delivered at University College, Dundee, June 27th, 1885 / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    attractive periodicals, the youth is put in possession of ready-made opinion on every conceivable subject: a crude mass of matter which he is taught to regard as real knowledge. Swollen with this puffy and unwholesome diet, he goes forth into the world regarding himself, like the infant in the nursery, as the centre of all things, the measure of the universe. He thinks he can evince his superiority by freely distributing sneers and scoffs upon all that does not agree with the set of opinions which he happens to have adopted from imitation, from fashion, or from chance. Having no root in itself, such a type of character is liable to become an easy prey to any popular charlatanism or current fanaticism. The word of encouragement shall be taken from one of my own old addresses; in which I have endeavoured to show forth as regards the medical art, but in terms, I think, applicable equally to every other, the principle that underlies all sound teaching and learning. It is this: The hrst lesson to be learned in order to make all other lessons possible is, in my opinion, this —to deal very largely with things and not with mere words; to realise as much as you can all your instruction by making it your own through personal observation ; to suffer nothing, if it can possibly be avoided, to lie in the mind as a dead weight of vocables, oppressing the memory and dwarfing the intellect, but to bring everything into the living light of fact and of nature, and thereby at once to assure to yourself the truth and exactness of your knowledge, while at the same time you are stamping it down upon the memory by the most sure and lasting of all technical methods. This is essentially the modern spirit of scientific inquiry, in virtue of which alone you can rise out of the dogmatisms and orthodoxies of the past to make secure and bene- ficial progress in the knowledge of your profession. I do not for a moment suppose that any of the able and accomplished men whom I see around me will differ from me in respect of the words I have just cited, or will think that they are aimed contemptuously at scholarship or the study of languages, or especially of the Greek and Latin languages when studied in the spirit of Mark Pattison, or of the best representatives of such studies in Oxford or Cambridge. To speak such words in the presence of Principal