A scheme of medical tuition / by E.A. Parkes.

  • Parkes, Edmund A. (Edmund Alexander), 1819-1876.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A scheme of medical tuition / by E.A. Parkes. 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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    carried on witliout them. Instead of less regulation, I would have more, only it should be effective. In the last two yeai-s the student has to master what is to be the business of his future life—viz., medical and surgical practice. The period is more disproportionate to the work than the first two years are to the elementary subjects. There is all the more necessity then, in this period also, for a general agreement as to what he should learn, though the difficulties of coming to such an agreement may be great. To attempt to teach the student everything—to believe that he can acquire in two years the full extent of subjects which tax all the powers of the most experienced men to comprehend,—can only lead to disappointment. Is it not a bitter sarcasm upon our system that the Medical Officer of the Privy Council has to ask the assistance of the Medical Council to procure him men properly instructed in the cutaneous phenomena of vaccination—that is to say, in one of the most elementary parts of medical educa- tion 1 How are we to interpret such a request ] Must it not be that both teachers and examiners have been busy in the wrong direction, and that simple, thorough instruction in the rudiments of practical medicine has been neither given nor tested 1 I speak from some experience of examinations when I say that a considera ble, though inaccurate knowledge of diffi- cult subjects • in medicine is often combined with a singular ignorance of very simple points. I have no space to analyse the_ reasons'^ of this state of things, which are, however, obvious enough. I must pass on to what I conceive to be the best mode of teaching medicine, surgery, and midwifery in the last two years, premising, however, that I am less familiar with the proper modes in the two latter subjects. The third year should, I believe, be entirely occupied with medicine and surgery, properly so called; midwifery and some other subjects being deferred to the fourth year. The students of the third and of the fourth years respectively ought not to be mixed up; they are in different stages of instruc- tion, and their classes should be separate. In the October of his third year the student has no knowledge of medicine and surgery, except what has been suggested by some of the practical courses. In fact, he has no business to have siich