Letter to the Right Hon. Viscount Cross, G.C.B., Secretary of State for India / by Surgeon-General Maclean.

  • Maclean, William Campbell, 1811-1898.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter to the Right Hon. Viscount Cross, G.C.B., Secretary of State for India / by Surgeon-General Maclean. 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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    to take up your Lordship's time by a defence of my own teaching. I have ceased to be a professor, and the subjects I taught are now in other hands. I content myself by appending to this letter a syllabus of the course of lectures I delivered, when I held the Chair of Military Medicine in the Army Medical School. I do not suppose any one, with any pretension to speak with knowledge and authority on such a subject, will venture to assert that-the subjects dealt with in this syllabus are other than of vital importance for Medical Officers about to devote their lives to the practice of their profession in India. This being so, I add without fear of successful contradiction, that in the many years of my professorship, I never found one man in fifty of the Surgeons on probation sent to Netley, who had any practical acquaintance with the diseases which formed the subjects of my teaching. I further say that the Surgeons on probation have, nine times out of ten, been ready to make this confession themselves, which they could well do without shame, in as much as Military Medicine has never formed, and never can form, a part of the course of instruc- tion in Civil Schools. It has been my good fortune to keep up friendly intercourse with large numbers of Netley men,'' after they have served in tropical climates, and I have had the gratification to receive letters from them gratefully thanking me for the instruction given, with the assurance that in the early and inexperienced days of their service the lessons given at Netley have been of inestimable use to them. I never supposed it would fall to my lot to have to defend the work of the late Professor Parkes, and his distinguished successor, the late Professor De Chaumont. The name of Parkes runs like a golden thread through the warp and woof of modern scientific medicine, it is to this day a house- hold word in every school of medicine in the kingdom, and, I may add, in every Capital of Europe. He may be said to have in this country created the science of Military Hygiene. As a teacher he was facile 2^'>'inceps, and to his teaching, directly and indirectly, no small share of the enormous diminution of mortality in the Army at home and in India can be distinctly traced. De Chaumont was a worthy successor, and obtained for himself an European reputation as a successful teacher and high authority on Hygiene in all its branches, until his career was closed by a too early death.