A prelection, introductory to the medical session of 1855-56, delivered before the University of Dublin / by William Stokes, M.D.

  • Stokes, William, 1804-1878.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A prelection, introductory to the medical session of 1855-56, delivered before the University of Dublin / by William Stokes, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    contemporaries who are preparing for their varied walks in life; and it excites the best ambition, by presenting so many examples of successful exertion. Lastly, it serves you by increasing your self-respect; for the humblest member of our profession, who has been thus educated, will feel, should he meet the mitred prelate, or the ermined judge, that in Academic rank he is not their inferior. Our profes- sion, Gentlemen, has long been in an anomalous position. While its more successful members may attain wealth, and rank, and consideration, the mass is not on an equal footing with that of the Church or the Bar. I will here only indicate one of the many causes of this state of things: it is, that so many of us have received but the special or exclu- sive education. It is not so in the Church, or at the Bar. And the evil has, in part, arisen from the fact, that in former times the study of Medicine was not sufficiently fostered by the old Universities. The teaching of Medicine passed in a great measure into private hands, and licensing bodies sprang up, who were content with the merely special education. The result is natural. Too often the student, while yet a boy, commonly uneducated even for his age, and knowing nothing of the world or of the require- ments of society, is set to work in the dissecting- room, or to sit on the benches of a medical theatre, to listen to lecture after lecture on topics exclusively professional, until the time comes when he is enabled to pass an examination on purely Medical subjects.