Two lectures : I. Lectures, books, and practical teaching ; II. Clinical instruction / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Two lectures : I. Lectures, books, and practical teaching ; II. Clinical instruction / 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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    so inform your minds as to render them a fitting soil for the further teaching derived from experience, from reading, and from social and pi'ofessional intercourse. In other words, in learning a few things well, you can teach yourselves, or be taught, how to learn many other things well by and bye. Now here, I think, is the special function of the professor, as compared with the book. He has not only to direct you xuhat to learn, but he has to teach you lioiv to learn. And above all, he has to present himself to you in the attitude of one willing and able to learn himself—naturce minister et interpres, as Lord Bacon has it. For, in a highly progressive science and art like medicine, the first duty of the teacher is to inform you that it is progressive; and this he can do best, or perhaps orAj, through his own personal example. He will teach you facts, not as closing the door, but rather as opening it to new facts; he will teach you principles, but not as fixed and unalterable dogmas. To quote Lord Bacon once more, he will deal much in the axiomata media, or provisional generalisations from facts ah-eady known; little in first principles, or speculative and abstract hypotheses as to the nature and causes of disease. Thus he will endeavour to imbue your minds vividly with what is least doubtful and most important; but along with this he will not forget that the first and last of lessons to a physician, or from a physician to students of disease, is, how and when to acknowledge ignorance and suspend judgment. A distinguished, but I believe still young, professor of ])hysical science has lately contributed some papers to certain periodicals, the object of which seems to be to discredit religion, or at least theology (which he believes to be a superstition), on the ground that it is immoral to believe what cannot be definitely proved. Now, I have nothing to do here with the opinions of this gentleman on the subject just mentioned; but in the application of his thesis to medicine I am confronted with the difficulty that in almost all the cases in which immediate action must be taken in very critical circum-