Two lectures ... : being introductory addresses delivered in the University of Glasgow, and in the Western Infirmary, session 1877-78 / by W.T. Gairdner, Professor of Practice of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.

William Tennant Gairdner

Date:: 1877

Credit: Two lectures ... : being introductory addresses delivered in the University of Glasgow, and in the Western Infirmary, session 1877-78 / by W.T. Gairdner, Professor of Practice of Medicine in the University of Glasgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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$Sources of Clinical InstTUction. disease too-ether from the absolute source of all real and final knowledge in respect to disease—the sick man. The lessons of a private practitioner to bis apprentices, in tbe days when ai)prenticesbips still existed, were true clinical instruction, and, witb such a man as Abercrombie, who practised tins method exclusively, they must have been clinical instruction of the best and highest kind. A well-conducted dispensary, in which tlie physicians not only see their patients at the hospital, but {\A\ow them up at their own homes, and along with their ])upils, is also a very fruitful and admirable field for true clinical instruction, and one which only requires competent and devoted men to make it at least equal, if not superior, to any other. Strange to say, howevci-, neither of these are counted as formal clinical instruction in your curriculum of study. Probably the difficulty of securing adequate regularit}^ of attendance, and a sufficient body of well-trained and thoroughly competent teachers, may be the reason why every kind of medical attendance upon the sick poor has not been more or less formally utilised for this purpose. But having for several years pursued this method, in connection with the Royal Public Dispensary of Edinburgh, where I had usuall}' classes varying from half-a-dozen to twenty pupils, and having given the hours of many a long afternoon to conferences with some of these, in almost all the closes between Holyrood and the West Port, on the cases of disease which were too urgent to be visited otherwise than at home, while others were seen at the Dispensary on two fixed days in the week, I am in a position to affirm that it is quite possible, and would be, I think, very desirable for you, that more should be made of this form of clinical instruction than has hitherto been done in Glasgow. Here, however, I am restrained by the consideration that I am not likely to be able to work in this direction myself; and I can only, therefore, commend to the junior physicians and surgeons of this hospital, and of the Royal Infirmary, the plan of clinical instruction to which I refer, of which the German Poli-klinik, or cliniquc of the toiun, is one of the numerous modifications. One thing, indeed, is necessary to$