On the relations between medicine, surgery, and obstetrics in London / by Robert Barnes.

  • Robert Barnes
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the relations between medicine, surgery, and obstetrics in London / by Robert Barnes. 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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    teaching? It must be assumed that one main duty of the obstet- ric physician to a hospital is to teach. But how can he teach who is not permitted to practise and learn? And if we would see absurdity in the superlative degree, we have only to reflect that the obstetric physician is called upon to teach gynecology to students who, by simply declining to take the style of physicians, resting content, as the majority of London students are compelled to be, with the style of surgeon, thereby become qualified to do what their teacher cannot do! And they are truly more fortunate than their teacher. They are free to learn, free to practise, and in this freedom they find the opportu- nity of advancing science, of applying it to the benefit of man- kind, and of earning an honorable reputation. But this freedom they will seek elsewhere than in a London school-hospital. Another evil consequence of the neglect of the pure physicians and surgeons to study the physiology and pathology of the female generative system by the objective method, is that they are neces- sarily incapacitated from judging with precision of the nature of most cases of disease of intrapelvic origin; and for the same rea- son they are unable to judge fairly of the merits of the men who more especially study gynecology. They yield to the natural bias of believing in those whose dicta reflect most closely their own imperfect knowledge. In this way the most grievous wrong is often done to the more enterprising and able obstetrists. These are branded as specialists by men, many of whom are themselves specialists in the closest meaning of the term. They who refuse to apply the recognized methods of objective observation to the pelvic organs, for whom there is no pathology below the hypogas- trium, have surely no right to denounce as specialists those who, not neglecting other regions and the body as a whole, embrace the pelvic organs within their field of research. I have submitted a definition of the term “specialist” which I venture to repeat: “A specialist is one who specially neglects important factors in the causation and process of disease.” Tried by this definition, which is the specialist; he who so neglects essential factors in the problem, or he \yho, studying with particular care those factors which the other neglects, does not neglect all recognizable factors in their individual and col- lective characters ? For my own part, I emphatically repudiate the title. Not less erroneous than the current idea of a specialist is that of the correlative so-called “ all-round man.” In its large and true sense, “the all-round man ” would be the highest type of