An inauagural discourse : on the policy of establishing a school of medicine in the city of Memphis, Tennessee / by the editor.

  • Cross, James Conquest.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inauagural discourse : on the policy of establishing a school of medicine in the city of Memphis, Tennessee / by the editor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    preclude the necessity for another School of Medicine. Amongst these may be mentioned the prominent and controling considera- tion, that they arc situated on the extreme Southern and South- eastern borders of the Union, and consequently on account of their distance receive comparatively little support from Ten- nessee, Alabama, Arkansas, the northern part of Mississippi, the South-western portion of Kentucky, the south-eastern sections of Illinois and Missouri, which )icld at least two-thirds of the pat- ronage received by Louisville and Lexington, but which, and for reasons utterly incontestible, should be supplied with physicians who have been taught by men of Southern or South-western ex- cxpericncc. In the present condition of things, however, hun- dreds of physicians are annually sent to the South from the schools of Louisville, Cincinnati and Lexington, who have been educa- ted by those who have had no personal acquaintance with the diseases of which they profess to impart a knowledge. That the Alumni of those institutions should, from the outset, prove success- ful practitioners, is not only improbable, but utterly impossible; for no material difference is observed to exist between the great pathological and therapeutical principles taught in them and those inculcated in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and no instance can be found of a Northern graduate being able to de- fend Northern principles, or to enforce successfully Northern practice in a Southern latitude. To the truth of this assertion all experience fully testifies. These he has been invariably obliged, sooner or later, radically to modify, or to recant altogether. This single fact independently of every other consideration, and we be- lieve it to be entirely indisputable, conclusively establishes the important position that those who have acquired their practical knowledge of disease in high latitudes, are not competent to ed- ucate those who intend to reside and practice in the South. It is Southern teachers only who arc qualified to make successful Southern practitioners of Medicine, and if this proposition is not sclf-evidently true, it is at least, susceptible of the most satisfac- tory proof. If this be denied, why, we ask, does it happen, that as a gener- al rule, those who have been educated in Northern or Western institutions, and who settle in the South or South-west find it ne- cessary to remove, after a residence of a few months from their