Opening of the new laboratory buildings, Medical Faculty, McGill University.

  • McGill University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
Date:
[1885]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Opening of the new laboratory buildings, Medical Faculty, McGill University. 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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    student must pass a preliminary examination conducted by recognised boards of experts. We have long since required evidence of the study of medicine for four years, during which three winter sessions ot six months must be spent at a recognised school. Two of the oldest Uni- versities now require four such winter sessions, and McGill lias recently made one summer session compulsory for the degree of M.D. The teaching in the medical schools is daily becoming more demonstrative and practical—a proof of which you have seen this afternoon in the several laboratories which have been provided in our new building, and in which I feel confident much good work will be done. In some of our best schools very great attention is paid to clinical teaching, and especially to bedside teaching, which is to didactic lectures in medi- cine and surgery what dissecting is to lectures on anatomy. So much importance is attached to bedside teaching in some of the Canadian schools, that a pass examination is conducted in the hospital, and a failure in it largely influences the fate ot the student. This should be insisted upon in every medical school. Practical examinations upon anatomy, histology, and chemistry are also insisted upon in some of the schools. I think, gentlemen, that sufficient has been said to intro- duce the toast (Medical Education in the United States and Canada), and to show that on this side of the water steady progress is being made in all the departments of what may be called medical education, and that a steady purpose to improve upon the past in this matter has taken possession of the leading schools in the United States and Canada. Professor Osler, in responding, said that when he that day visited the school with which he was connected for ten of the happiest years of his life, it seemed that in the short year that elapsed since he left McGill they had made more progress than in the ten years during which he was connected with the college. So recently had he been with his brethren south of the line, he might feel excused if he did not refer to the many anomalies that existed in the profession in that country. How it was that such a shrewd, practical people as those in the States should have drifted into such a loose, slipshod way of conduct- ing medical schools was unintelligible. To think that two sessions in some schools and three sessions in only a few, a man should be con- sidered qualified to take charge *of important lives in the country, was indeed an anomaly. This arose from the abuse that any set of men with sufficient influence could get a charter to establish a medical school from the state legislature. In Canada there was a striking contrast. A man required to be educated before he com- menced the study of medicine, he had to pass through tour sessions in college, and he had to pass a stringent examination before he obtained his license. The people of Canada ought to appreciate this, because they were in the care of experienced, educated men, and not at the mercy of quacks and charlatans. In Ontario and Quebec, the profession was in advance of any of the States, and even ahead of the older countries, for they had examining boards before which every practitioner from another country had to pass to obtain leave to practice. What was now to be considered in Canada was the advancement of practical and scientific teaching in medicine, and the opening of such a building as that which we have seen to-day is an important step in this direction. It should be a source of pride to Montreal and her people that such an institution was in their midst. (Applause.) Dr. Rottot, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Laval, speaking in
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