Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/18

 in the present instance, to issue at once, by the simple and undeniable position, that physicians educated at Edinburgh are fully equal in every respect to those of any other school, and the plain inference from this would seem to be, that their opportunities of education, and their use of them, are also equal.

No imaginable limits can be assigned to these speculative innovations, if once the simple principle be departed from, of confining the education and examination of a candidate for a degree, within its own distinct and proper province; and constitutions of education will become as rife, and the art of concocting them as notorious, as the political constitutions of the French Jacobins. By-and-by it will be maintained, that medical gentlemen, in addition to this general knowledge, must be well skilled in other professions; in jurisprudence, for instance, it will be said that they cannot acquit themselves, in courts of justice, like scholars and gentlemen, without being juris-consults, even after having mastered all the respectable writers on Forensic Medicine. Nor will the catalogue of languages stop with Greek: it will perhaps be necessary to read the works of certain physicians in Arabic. In a little while, possibly, the graduate will be required to parse a Paternoster in Sclavonic; and oh! what hidden stores of mind may be slumbering under the manacles of Sanscrit? What a sealed book is Chinese