The medical library in post-graduate work : an address delivered at the Inaugural Meeting of the Medical Library Association held at Belfast, July 28th, 1909 / by William Osler.

  • Osler, William, Sir, 1849-1919.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The medical library in post-graduate work : an address delivered at the Inaugural Meeting of the Medical Library Association held at Belfast, July 28th, 1909 / by William Osler. 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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    graduate study. Out of leading-strings he must himself be at once teacher and pupil, and make and keep certain self-made laws. Whether he will get this education, whether, indeed, he will be able to keep what he has, will depend in part upon the sort of training he has received, and in part upon the type of mind with which he has been endowed. Unless as a student he has got that “ relish of knowledge ” of which Locke speaks ; unless he has got far enough to have his senses well trained to make accurate observations ; unless he has been taught how to use his intelligence so as to form a good judgement, the teacher will have more or less of a fool for a pupil, and between them make a sad mess of an education. After a few years such a man gives up in despair, and without mental exercise grows stale and is fit to do only the ordinary reflex practice, in which cough means an expectorant mixture, and heart disease digitalis, just as surely as a tap on the patellar tendon brings out the knee-jerk. A glance at the consulting-room suffices for the diagnosis of this type: the British Medical Journal or Lancet lies uncut in heaps on the table, and not a book is in sight ! Some of the men of this type play a good game of tennis, others shoot and ride well, more play a good game of bridge, but they are lost souls, usually very dissatisfied with the profession—the kickers, the knockers, the grumblers, without a glimmer of consciousness that the fault is in themselves. Post-graduate study is a habit of mind only to be acquired, as are other habits, in the slow repetition of the practice of looking at everything with an inquiring spirit. A patient with pneumonia has grass green sputum. “ Have I ever seen it before ? Have I a note of it ? Whore can 1 get a good description of it ? What does it signify ? ” These are questions preliminary to getting a bit of clinical education, trifling in itself apparently, but when stored up and correlated with other facts may become the basis for an intelligent judgement on an important case. There are many factors in this training—note-taking, reading, the medical society, and the quinquennial brain- dusting at a hospital or a post-graduate school. But I am only here concerned with one—books. I would like to speak of the value of notes, however brief, collected through long years as the sole means whereby a man gets his experience codified and really helpful; but I cannot wander to-day from the book, in which I include the Journal. But how can a busy man read, driven early and late, tired out and worried ? He cannot. It is useless to try, unless he has got into the habit when he was not so busy; then it comes easy enough, and the hardest-worked man in the land may read his journals every week, even if he has to do it in his carriage. My old teacher and colleague at McGill, Palmer Howard, was the busiest practitioner in Montreal, but the weeklies and the monthlies, English and French, the good old Quarterly, the hospital reports, the new monographs—nothing escaped him, and I have