Observations regarding medical education ; in a letter addressed to the President of the Royal College of Surgeons / by John Simon.
- John Simon
- Date:
- 1842
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Observations regarding medical education ; in a letter addressed to the President of the Royal College of Surgeons / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
19/40 page 15
![16 specialities of medicine and of surgery, its omission in the physiological course would yet seem little less than a dis- integration of the subject. General therapeutics (to the extent in which they form the common axioms of medical and surgical practice) are now professedly taught in conjunction with an account of the Materia Medica: but so unfit or inopportune an exten- sion is given to this last, that the course, which might be of immense interest and value to the young student, frequently assumes in his view a complexion of wearisome dulness. It would indeed be far otherwise if the teacher were jus- tified in supposing his audience pre-informed in botany and chemistry, and possessed of other means and opportunity for learning in detail the physical characters and compati- bilities of drugs. He might (under such conditions of pre- liminary education as I have already considered) cease to dwell on botanical characters, to diagrammatise decomposi- tions, and to explain the detail of pharmacy; and his in- structions, relieved from this heterogeneous burthen, would rise to the dignity of a dissertation on the resources of me- dicine, in subordinate connexion with those indications for treatment, which the inter])reted language of symptoms affords. The student would thus be enabled, in his second year of technical occupation, to advance with confidence and profit toward the ultimate goal of his labours ; for, having learned in general pathology, as it were, the dynamics of disordered life, and in general therapeutics the means of remedial counteraction, he is prepared for the more intricate pro- blems which actual disease, in combination and irregularity •—which practical medicine, in success and in failure, in boldness and in caution, in knowledge and in doubt, will afterwards and hourly present to him. 2. As regards the mode of teaching. Observation has convinced me, that great and general](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21359088_0019.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
