Medical education, character, and conduct : introductory addresses, delivered to students of medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1855-1866-1882 / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical education, character, and conduct : introductory addresses, delivered to students of medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1855-1866-1882 / by W.T. Gairdner. 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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    hospital study. Even then the total period of professional as distinguished from general education extended over about six years ; and, as the examination might be passed at the age of twenty-one, was usually commenced not later than fifteen.” I interrupt the quotation at this point simply to say that one has to go back a long way in the history of medical education in Scotland to find a state of matters at all resembling the one here described. We had our errors and deficiencies, no doubt, and to some of them I shall allude 4 more or less distinctly before I have done ; but at no time within my recollection, nor, I think, within the recollection of those who preceded me, and whom I remember as my own instructors, was it even possible in Scotland to mistake a “ surgery boy ” of fourteen, prematurely withdrawn from school in order to manufacture pills and potions, and run errands, and make himself generally useful in a “ shop ” where he was under indentures to an “ apothecary,” for a regular student of medicine. To whatever extent the ap- prenticeship system held its ground in Scotland twenty-five or even fifty years ago (and far be it from me to say that in the hands of such men as Abercrombie, and others like him, it was not a system capable of much good) it was always controlled by a regular academic discipline, emanating mainly from the Universities, but largely reinforced, I am bound to say, by the co-ordinate influence, and often rivalry, of some of the corporations in building up what is now called the medical curriculum. In Scotland, at the period
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