The medical school of the future / by John Struthers.

Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical school of the future / by John Struthers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    lesson he taught his contemporaries, and to us, and for all time, that we must go to Nature. The man of to-day says, Why should I trouble myself to read old Harvey’s treatise, don’t we all know the circulation of the blood ? But that epoch-making treatise, short and modest, carries a profound lesson to us all, and, like the Sermon on the Mount, bears reading again and again. But while it is quite true that the education we give ourselves is the more important of the two, it is a great thing to have a good teacher, one who will start us in the right path, who will give us our method. Time is our most valuable possession, and to have had such a teacher may save us years of our life, the bitter feeling as we near the end that perhaps half of even a constantly busy life has been wasted. Though we are not here from the point of view of trying to make you Harveys and Hunters, it would be a poor compliment to you not to hope that some of you will be found in the honoured rank of those who have exploded error and extended the boundaries of knowledge, or that there may not be now on these benches some one youth, not yet kindled, whose name shall go down to posterity. But we have to bear in mind that every medical practitioner has to be an observer and thinker at every bedside to which he is called, whether in the mansion or the hovel. It will enable us to answer the question, What constitutes a good teacher ? if we bear in mind two fundamental considerations. The one, that all our knowledge is derived from the observation of Nature; the other and consequent one, that such knowledge is constantly on the move. These may at this time of day seem mere platitudes, but I ask, Do we bear them in mind in our teaching, and do we train and indoctrinate our students in accordance with them ? How was it that fourteen hundred years elapsed after the time of Galen till Harvey came and discovered the true course of the blood ? Many eminent men, whose names have come down to us through the ages, lived and worked. But they believed in Galen, the Divine Man, as he was called, as infallible. Galen himself seems to us to have stood on the brink of the discovery, but his own theoiy and his vanity stood in the way. The blood moved from the liver, out and back again, like the flowing and ebbing tide, a plausible theory it you look at a good diagram of the veins of tie liver. Io reach the left ventricle, where the lamp of life bumed, the blood was assumed to pass through “porosities” of the septum, although he must have seen the great pulmonary orifice gaping open. Harvey went to Nature, made countless dissections of animals and experiments, over thirteen years, all the while practising his profession, and step by step arrived at his great demonstration. The famous Fabricius, Harvey’s teacher, still taught that the blood went outwards in the veins, and that the valves are a wise provision to moderate the outward How. From B