A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / 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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    most successful physicians who could compete with the highly automatic money-making machinery of Holloway’s pills and ointment, or old Dr. Jacob Townsends sarsa- parilla. From any other than the merely lucrative point of view, and happily, in the end, with most of you (I trust), even from the j*oint of view of a reasonable worldly pros- perity, it is most undesirable that you should yield, in the very slightest degree, to this insidious form of temptation. Now, it is at this point that I find it needful to have a very few words with my friend Mr. Wheclhouse, not, I trust, inappropriate to the present occasion, concerning some of the remarks which he made here a few weeks ago in that most admirable address of his, as president of the British Medical Association. I do not suppose at all that wc differ greatly in essentials, or perhaps even in details; certain I am that we have both one object at heart, the advancement of our profession, alike in its essential usefulness and in the good opinion generally entertained of it; which, indeed, forms a part, and a large part, of its usefulness to the public. But some of the remarks in that address appear to me to be open to an interpretation which possibly is not the one intended, but which at all events I desire not to allow to pass current without a corral. It seems to be assumed or suggested that, in order to keep a medical education upon what are supposed to be practical lines, it is necessary that every student, before getting his name on the Medical Register, shall have had opportunities of seeing, handling, and in a certain sense treating, almost every kind of