Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/16

 medica, practice of medicine, &c. &c. was qualified to practise medicine. If these new regulations are essential to medical practice, then have these illustrious professors been yearly deluging the kingdom with incompetent physicians, and, what is perhaps a more serious fault in the estimation of some individuals, have been palming upon the public M. D. clowns, men who, ex officio et cathedra, were not ascertained to be competent to dance gracefully a quadrille, hand a lady of quality to her carriage, and quibble away with a blue stocking on the eloquence of and the powers of the steam-engine. Although it may be questioned, whether, in a large proportion of genteel (nervous) diseases, the honest bluntness of a might not be more effectual than the greasy smoothness of some courtly. But even admitting that graduate dunces and clowns occasionally occur, because such excrescences are sometimes thrown forth on the surface of a vigorous and healthy system, is that whole system to be broken down? is a merely local-accidental cutaneous affection, not implicating the general health, to demand a destructive mercurial course, sapping the foundations, and demolishing the fabric of the constitution? I hope, for the safety of the lieges, that these reformers, if they are of the medical profession, reason and practise more logically and soundly in real than in metaphorical pathology. To expect that any system of regulations is, in every case,