Diseases and injuries of seamen : with remarks on their enlistment, naval hygiene, and the duties of medical officers / by G.R.B. Horner.

  • G. R. B. Horner
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diseases and injuries of seamen : with remarks on their enlistment, naval hygiene, and the duties of medical officers / by G.R.B. Horner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    34/276
    materia medica, chemistry, and the practice of medi- cine, and yet be unfit to perform some of the most trifling operations required, and to determine the pathological state of a patient, or prescribe the appro- priate remedies in many of the most ordinary diseases. To ascertain accurately the relative qualifications of candidates for the merchant service, a merit roll ought to be kept, on which, in its appropriate place, the degree of merit of each candidate, in each require- ment should be put down. A roll of this kind is kept by our military board of examiners, and has been re- cently introduced into that of our navy. Each re- quirement is assigned a number—the highest is 100, the lowest 20—and the candidate who obtains the highest aggregate number, or attains the nearest to 1000, is entitled to the first appointment, and ranks all other candidates. The following is the roll or scale of merit adopted by the recent Board of Naval Examiners, at the recommendation of the Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. The roll is arbi- trary and ideal in its arrangements, and may not accurately determine the relative value of each branch of knowledge, but still enables the Board to more accurately assign the rank of the candidates than when little or no regard was paid to the subject, every branch was given the same value, and when the votes having been taken, a candidate possessed of the highest degree of merit in the practice of medicine and sur- gery was put on a par with, if not reduced below him who was more learned in some of the subordinate branches.