Page:Address on the Medical Education of Women (1864) - Blackwell.djvu/13

 the medical charge of the sick, and the directorship of the health of families. This examination should not be a pretence.

The tests now laid down for women medical students are altogether insufficient. To question twenty pupils, or even one pupil during half an hour or an hour on the substance of a hundred lectures, will very imperfectly ascertain even the theoretical knowledge of the pupil on the one special branch, much less will it show her ability to detect disease and control a sick room. Each pupil should be carefully examined not only in all essential theoretical points in the lecture-room or professor's study, but in the still more vital subjects that can only be tested in the hospital by the sick bed, in the surgical and anatomical rooms, by manipulation and demonstrations, and in the laboratory by familiarity with medicines. Examinations in diagnosis, in the practical applications of every branch of medicine, are essential to judge of the qualifications of a physician. This plan of examinations differs in kind as well as degree, from the system now adopted for women. Of course it is much more troublesome, requires a much larger expenditure of time and thought, but we believe that too much labour cannot be expended on examinations, that they are of the very highest importance in securing a class of reliable women physicians.

Secondly,—The plan of education should be enlarged. This will be evident from the character of the examinations which I have sketched; a student formed by the simple plan of lecturing, could not pass through such examinations. In educating medical students we have to deal with young and comparatively undisciplined minds. An experienced medical teacher (Mr. Paget, of London,) once told me that he considered the age of nineteen as the very best for a medical student to begin his studies. Now the mind at this age, and all undisciplined minds of any age, do not work alone to advantage. There is a natural tendency to acquire information vaguely and imperfectly they