On professional education, with special reference to medicine : an address delivered at King's College, London on October 3, 1905 / by T. Clifford Allbutt.

  • Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On professional education, with special reference to medicine : an address delivered at King's College, London on October 3, 1905 / by T. Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    glory too much in the “ uselessness ” of his pursuit —that is, in its purely prospective profit. In his ardour for the long run he may forget that most of us, while admiring the loftiness and even the aloofness of “ pure ” research, that which no doubt will tell some day, and may indeed break into amazing effect even to-morrow, have yet day by day to live on a homelier trot, and need not so much a brilliant orbit for our wings as a lantern for our feet. But there is a graver fault than this, for indeed the pursuit of verification on the lines of great speculations is no error but the noblest service. Our danger is not that advanced students are splendidly impracticable, these men will not overrun our academies, but lest they be convicted of a less splendid ineffectiveness. Roberts-Austin was angered, and justly, by the indiscriminate phrase “ applied science.” Applied science is experimental science, and the scientific student whose argument is too high for the common occupations of men, for “ the brewer, the baker, and the candlestick-maker,” is untrue to the principles of the experimental method on which all science directly depends, and for which nothing is common or unclean. It is in every-day life, in things as they are falling out around us every hour and every moment, that principles are to be tested, problems discovered, results sifted, processes improved, know¬ ledge increased, and standards established. If, then, in their maturity, the older universities begin to lose the spirit of adventure ; if they cease to vibrate with life to the innermost; if they nurse
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