On professional education, with special reference to medicine : an address delivered at King's College, London on October 3, 1905 / by T. Clifford Allbutt.

  • Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On professional education, with special reference to medicine : an address delivered at King's College, London on October 3, 1905 / by T. Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    twenty-three had pursued an unbroken university career. Finally, is the student when just released from the wards of a hospital at the end of his fifth year, quite fit for private practice ? We are assured that he is not, not even if after qualification he has held the usual “house appointments'’; that for private practice there is still much in which even a highly educated student is ignorant or unskilled. My old friend and colleague, Mr. C. G-. Wheelhouse, used to impress this upon us time after time, and on the ground of such deficiencies to lament the abolition of apprenticeship. More recently, Mr. M. A. Wardle, of Bishop Auckland, has temperately and persuasively expressed the same opinions.1 For my own part, while I admit how much the young diplome or graduate has to learn in the way of tact and little adroitnesses in the management of private patients, in the conduct of trivial or tedious disorders which do not find their way into hospitals, in the dispensing of medicines, and so forth, yet surely to revive the bond of apprenticeship for these minor accomplishments is to burn a house for roast pig. Manual dexterity, it is true, can be gained only in early life, but this would come with the earlier application to anatomy which I advocate. The apprentice did not always get the best or most conscientious of masters; in any case he was liable to be infected, at a critical time of his life, and too often was infected, with an incurable empiricism, and became habituated to a narrow routine. A 1 Brit. Med. Journal, Sept. 27, 1902.
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