Observations regarding medical education : in a letter, addressed to the President of the Royal College of Surgeons / by John Simon.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations regarding medical education : in a letter, addressed to the President of the Royal College of Surgeons / by John Simon. 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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    view with strict and exclusive care: during its earlier half, three or four hours in the middle of each day should be given to visiting the wards of a hospital, and to attending the clinical lectures, and the demonstrations of morbid anatomy, which illustrate its practice; and the anatomical studies of the forenoon should take, as much as possible, the form of surgical anatomy. Thus the systematic lectures on the three branches of practice would fall (as indeed they ought to fall, for the student can ill afford at this period to exhaust daylight in the lecture-room) to the evening; but I am inclined to believe that if clinical teaching were constant and efficient, (as in some foreign schools, where it resolves itself into a familiar commentary on each day's visit) it would form an advantageous sub- stitute for a considerable portion of the systematic courses. During its later months, the same general plan should be followed, with a care to excite the student's personal in- terest in practice, and to prepare him for future responsi- bility ; the opportunity of attending cases, under proper direction, should be afforded him, and a registry of them required at his hands. Closer observation of particular classes of disease (surgical and medical specialities) should be encouraged, and theses on them invited by the clinical teachers. Courses of lectures on the higher biology (with more abundant adduction of comparative anatomy and of embryo- logy, than belonged to the earliest view of the same subject) and on Forensic Medicine and Hyyiene, would likewise en- gage the student's attention, and complete the circle of his regulated academic training. III. It should be a leading object, and a characteristic feature, in the whole scheme of instruction, to superintend the pupil's course; not only to inform him, but to ascertain his progress; not only to sketch his route, but to direct its detail. Thus, when his term of pupilage is accomplished, the teachers of his school can certify for him that he has