Address on medical education : delivered at University College, Dundee, June 27th, 1885 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address on medical education : delivered at University College, Dundee, June 27th, 1885 / by W.T. Gairdner. 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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    of the old Scotch Universities, and he is a very distinguished Professor. This, indeed, is an exception; but what is to come of the mass of the men who may be thus attracted by the earlier subjects, and who are induced in one way or another to prolong the association, so that in four years there is literally no time for us to teach the other important branches ? We do our best, we clinical teachers. But what if the students come to us unprepared ? What if they come to get their eyes and their ears educated for the first time as to things they should have been educated in long ago ? Observe the difficulty, for it is a very serious diffi- culty. The practical training and discipline is, as it were, shunted into a corner, and so made impossible ; and this is more especially the case with the physician's training which, coming in the order of time necessarily after the surgical, and yet being much wider and more complicated in its scope, is too apt to be run entirely into the fourth year of study, and not half done even then, simply because the man, with all his previous training, is not half ready for it. Now to meet this difficulty, which we all acknowledge is a serious one, I have heard of tAvo different kinds of proposals. One is to throw back a considerable portion of the early scientific training from the Colleges into the schools; to demand of the schools the teaching of elementary physics, chemistry, and biology. Well, perhaps many of those here who know the schools and the school system of Scotland much better than I do v/ill be able to say whether that be desirable or not. It is plain we are not ripe for it just now. The schools have not the apparatus— have not the means of giving anything more than a mere know- ledge by rote ; and knowledge by rote is worse than no knowledge at all. Unless the schools can teach these things, as Professor D'Arcy Thompson and the other professors teach them here, they need not begin. Therefore, for a long time to come that plan may be considered as practically out of the question. A second proposal is to extend the curriculum to five years. Well, speak- ing for myself, I have no objection to that. The matter has been discussed and argued in the Medical Council without any decided conclusion being arrived at. At present you may regard it as
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