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
Licence: Public Domain Mark
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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![Evils of Faidty Methods. l>revent this mode of instruction from becoming a mere sham and an abuse of the name of clinical teaching, viz.—a ])rop('r subdivision of the work; and, as arising from this, a sufficient amount of time given to it. Hurr3^-scurrying through thirty or forty cases in an hour, as is done in the out-practice of many hospitals, is not instruction, but the reverse; or, if instructii)n at all, it is simply instruction in bad habits—absolutely fatal habits—of inaccuracy and want of thought. It is painful to me to be led even to allude to this subject; for it is not alone the injury done to the sick poor, in many Ccises, but the still greater, because persistent and absolutely irremediable, injury done to the medical art and to the students and junior practitioners of it, by the system of hasty consultations involved in the vast and quite over-grown out-practice of many hospitals in London and elsewhere, that demands a word of stern and sad remark. What is to become of young men trained in such habits, in after life, if at the very outset of their career it is made plain to them by the bad example of their seniors, that live minutes, or three minutes, or two minutes, perchance, is all that can be spared for the investigation of a case of serious internal disease, with a view to its treatment ? if, moreover, this rapid and unexactino: frame of mind is identified in the imagination of the junior with something that is called practical, whicli may be roughly defined as the faculty of transacting the greatest possible amount of business—I.e., making the greatest number of blind guesses, and writing the greatest number of brainless prescriptions, in the shortest possible lapse of time ? I believe, speaking as a man who knows what medical consultations are, and what amount of time and care they really require, that no more ruinous lesson could possibly be taught at the outset, than this; and, on the other hand, that nothing is more absolutely essential for true clinical instruction than an abundance of time, so that every case that is made the subject of remark at all, shall be, as nearly as ])ossible, completely investigated according to all the lights that can be brought to bear upon it, alike from ancient experi- ence and from modern science. And this is perhaps the one diffi-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21464352_0023.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
