Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/28

 garnished over by the subtle casuistry of heathen Ethics? Were there no abominations in their eternal civil broils, no foreign wars of ambition, of conquest, of murder, of plunder, and aggression? Have we forgotten the practice of the monsters of the French revolution, who always quoted these classical models to justify every breach of social order, and every outrage on human nature? Yet while we reprobate these studies as forming essential constituents of medical education, we by no means are hostile to physicians devoting their leisure to the pursuits of general literature and science;—it must be borne always in mind, that it is compulsory attention to them, and rendering them necessary preliminaries to a degree in this profession to which we are resolutely opposed. Leave them to the voluntary selection of each individual as a matter of individual taste and prudence, and then we are certain they will retain their due place. Innovators have no right obtrusively to dictate to a practitioner what they conceive to be the best mode of squeezing himself into genteel patrician practice, an object which must be effected by many other means than the mere possession of literary and scientific attainments, and which each physician will or will not follow out under any imaginable system of regulations, as his taste or his interest prescribes to him.