Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/12

 to preserve an honest title to the confidence of patients. If they are good for any thing, then some provision should be devised for keeping them during the period of the natural life of the graduate fresh in his recollection. For this purpose, I would beg leave to suggest an annual or triennial examination of all the physicians in the empire; and, in composing rules for its proceedings, many useful hints might be gathered from the economy of similar institutions,—such as the Wesleyan Conferences, and the periodical assemblages of Friends.

These irrelevant attainments must therefore rank, in as far as medicine is concerned, with the boarding-school accomplishments of dancing, music, and the French language, which every Missy is compelled to attempt before marriage, and which she almost as regularly forsakes after it.

It seems to be forgotten, that while, in every other department of knowledge and inquiry, of science and art, the principle of division of labour is duly appreciated and applied, in the business of professional education it is to be most strenuously denounced; the object seems to be, not to make good physicians, but jacks-of-all-trades, and speculative pedants. While the practice of medicine is so vast and extensive a field, that it has been found necessary to subdivide it amongst physicians, surgeons, accoucheurs, apothecaries, oculists, aurists, dentists, men for