Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/7

 venturing to undertake the proof of a deficiency in general knowledge amongst the physicians of the present day. Now, it is the compulsory nature of this course of study, and its trifling and remote utility, or rather its utter worthlessness, in relation to judicious and useful medical practice, that are the points on which we are mainly at variance with these reformers.

Most of the advocates for changing our present systems, or for assimilating them to those of the Continent, seem to have imbibed Utopian ideas of university legislation, and to have been led away by the visionary fallacy of legislating for men as they ought to be, not as experience proves they are. They have realized to themselves the beau-ideal of what an accomplished physician ought to be; and the regulations which they are endeavouring to introduce are accommodated to this abstraction. Now, nothing is more easy than to conjure up phantasms of this description, and to frame codes of laws for giving them theoretically "a local habitation and a name;" but to bring them down from the limbo of vanity, and apply them to real life, we find it, constituted as human nature is, to be impracticable. We may, in a speculative perfectibility mood, indulge our imaginations in conceiving what the accomplished Merchant, for instance, ought to be. We may invest him with all that is brilliant in theory and invention, all that is profound in philosophy, and all that is felicitous