A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / 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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    which redeems all our professional work alike from barren- ness and from falsehood in principle. You first encounter these laws and phenomena in your study of chemistry and anatomy, zoology and botany. I advise you to lay the foundations well /here, and by no means to lay the flattering unction to your souls that any of these are useless studies, because they seem not to be immediately practical. Apart from their manifold applications in practice, they are of untold value as a discipline. And, as I have insisted elsewhere, this discipline at an early stage of your medical career is of special importance, because it is of a kind almost over- looked in much of your earlier school education. What you learn in these scientific departments—always supposing that they are taught practically, and not only in books and lectures—is to come to a closer grip with Nature and with fact, and not to be deceived and deluded either with false shows or learned philosophies and philosophisings. And this is a kind of knowledge, the knowledge of things as opposed to words and abstract ideas (for so Michael Faraday called it), which is often greatly deficient even in educated minds, and the want of which is felt at every stage of a medical career. Let thoroughness, therefore, enter into all your dealings with these earlier studies—those of your first and second year. It is not merely that you are gaining informa- tion, but that you are forming habits. Then,, as regards the application of the habits so formed to your studies in medicine and surgery proper, I will ask you to-day to receive, and to ponder, only one or two
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